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Mostly, we didn’t forget the cameras.

Quite the opposite really. There’s probably no such thing as ‘reality tv’ based upon the plethora of very leading questions and the numerous ‘can you just say that agains’ etc.

But there was a very strange side to all of this. Some of the bits they edited out were in some ways more insightful and ‘treacley’ (if that’s a word).

My relationship with my deceased stepdad was probed and I spoke about it openely. How he bullied me into becoming someone who wanted to strive for perfection so much so that he couldn’t – well – bully me any more.

Was this the foundation for why I’m a pretty driven chap?

This ‘emotional nakedness’ took me by surprise a bit I have to say. So yes – we (or certainly I) did forget the cameras from time to time.

Thank you again for your message, and for the comment on our blog: http://blog.onebestway.com/.

Michael

It was actually the Daily Telegraph coverage that caught our eye – whatever anyone’s personal standpoint, the process was undeniably hugely successful as a means of putting yourselves in the public eye – and we watched the programme out of curiousity rather than prurience. Interesting that David Taylor and yourselves took a line of working together to change behaviours that was so far from anonymity and giving people a safe, secure environment to explore new ideas: some of us made the contrast with (for example) Alcoholic’s Anonymous (an earlier posts here people might want to read), where the concepts of ‘possibly entertaining others’ and ‘tackling your issues’ are kept deliberately at arm’s length. (In a country where nudity – apart from its potential shock value and its potently personal aspects – still carries such ‘Carry On’ fnar-laden baggage, mixing the two struck us as especially brave.)

If you hadn’t been being filmed, how differently do you think the experience and experiment might have worked out? Just as the filming process is an ‘edited truth’, surely it also influences what is happening too: very few of us – no matter how media savvy – would ‘forget the cameras’ were there in under 5 days, especially if undressing was involved!)

Good luck to you all – and may the changes in your working lives be enduring: given the success from a profile-raising point of view, we suspect you’re going to be a busy team for quite a while yet. And thank you for looking at ASK too.

And I also should mention that of all the things we’ve read about The Naked Office your work above is probably the best if the gauge is to do with being ‘measured and thought provoking’ as opposed to ‘gushing with praise’ or ‘attacking’.

There were, of course, three distinct things going on in parallel on this programme.

onebestway was about to be exposed (ahem) to around a million people in a week, and we may also end up with a more bonded team too. So we had two things to think about there.

The third clearly was that we were playing a significant role in the creation of a TV programme. A piece of entertainment.

These three things are sometimes difficult to align as people question where your priorities lie. Mine, for the record, are always with onebestway and angelfysh and it’s clients.

…

As it happened, many millions of people now know the onebestway brand all over the world and we do indeed have a cleverer, more insightful, faster and braver team.

So we are happy.

I think that this experience is what it is, though. It’s something that people can talk about and form views on and it’s – for me – not something that’s absolutely right or absolutely wrong.

Perhaps that’s the attraction.

It’s so unusual that it’s difficult to align it with anything that one may have already experienced. The truth is I think that no one knows what it’s really like because they havn’t done it. So they can only guess. Probably a perfect formulae for talkability.

And finally I think it’s worth remembering what is happening fundamentally when a TV production company makes a programme or a newspaper is writing a story.

(This, incidentally is just my view of course – I am not saying that this is true. It is however my truth).

The media is essentially acting like a prism.

They pull in – well – whatever they like really – and then distill it down to something simpler and cleaner and easier to ‘get’ or understand or digest. So much gets lost in this process but it’s the nature of the process I think.

I am certainly not complaining. It’s great!

But I think that it changes something when we factor this in.

It changes the quest for real understanding of what’s really going on from ‘difficult’ to ‘impossible’.

The TV version of onebestway is actually a pretty good representation of the truth, but it certainly is not all of it – by any stretch.

Thank you for taking a look at onebestway, angelfysh and David Taylor though, albeit through the lense of those lovely people at Virgin 1 and Shine.