ITV’s recessionary comedy Monday Monday has created a stir within the HR community.
The programme, which screens at 9pm on Monday nights on ITV, is a colourful farce about the questionable behaviour of an alcoholic HR department head.
The writers miraculously managed to weave a short discussion about defined benefit (DB) funding deficits into the whirlwind plot of the prime-time comedy – an artistic feat that many compensation and benefits professionals would have not thought possible.
The acting talent of actress Fay Ripley, who plays boozy HR head Christine Frances, enriches the show’s unique portrayal of HR practices at floundering retail firm Butterworths.
Any HR manager who is feeling insecure about their own abilities can take comfort from the fact that Christine has to enlist the help of her personal assistant for even the simplest of tasks, including sending text messages.
Describing her character for a Q&A interview that appeared on the ITV website Ripley said: “People ask how this woman has kept her job but it’s like a lot of offices, she has just been there a long time, probably from a junior and probably wasn’t too bad originally.
“She ends up getting away with it because everyone knows it and they cut her some slack. People correct stuff for her. People facilitate her – she is rubbish at her job and allowed to be. She’s the kind of woman that does a lot of crosswords at work.”
Join our forum discussion: How far removed is Monday Monday from your day at work?