Here's a brilliant idea for a TV recession reality show from sardonic
Financial Times columnist, Lucy Kellaway.
However, I have a better idea for a recession television series: it would also be compulsive viewing but might do good rather than evil. My show, to be called The Begging Bowl, would make the CEOs of failing businesses compete for loans and handouts. They would each give a brief presentation and then be grilled by a panel. (I like to see myself as its Sharon Osbourne – tough yet compassionate). Viewers would then decide whom to bail out and whom to abandon to the receivers.
....awkward questions about pay and perks would routinely be asked of contestants on my show. The CEOs would have to talk about how their companies had got into their current mess and how they proposed to get out of it. Those, like Land of Leather, the UK sofa company that went under last week in spite of having been fairly prudent, might end up saved by popular demand.
As she says, why shouldn't governments put the billions they are already forking out to rescue the banks into a TV pot and let taxpayers decide who gets what. It's our money, after all.