The Insider
Contents |
Host
unknown (narrator)
Broadcast
Studio Lambert for BBC Three, 2 to 24 September 2013 (4 episodes in 1 series)
Synopsis
Five young candidates are up for a job in a major firm, and we follow them living together in a house, and performing the usual sort of made-for-television tasks. What they don't know is that one of them is an insider, a mole planted there by the bosses, someone who will be reporting back on their actions to the future employer. Though the applicants don't know there's an insider, we viewers do.
The novelty here is this additional knowledge, and The Insider never quite worked out how to take advantage of its gimmick. Was it a detective programme, where the viewer wouldn't be told the mole's identity until near the end? Or was it a fly-on-the-wall documentary about an unusual recruitment process? In the event, the insider was revealed to the viewer about half-way through the show, an unsatisfactory compromise.
Shorn of this "who's the mole" question, we were left with little more than a puff piece for fashionable companies, and candidates we didn't know enough about to particularly care who got the job.
Web links
Competitor Jon Scales's view (contains some strong language)
