Lee Ross

TV preview: White Gold, BBC2

The year is 1985. Eight months have passed since Vincent Swan (Ed Westwick) - Essex's premier and most amoral double glazing salesman - teamed up with gangster Ronnie (Lee Ross) and forced his boss Walshy (Nigel Lindsay) to sell Cachet Windows to them for a measly pound coin.

Advertising sitcom The Persuasionists was so imbecilic, you had to see it to believe it. Episode one centred on the marketing campaign for "Cockney Cheese" and the slogan "Cockney Cheese. Leave it aaaaaat !"

"If he's a Cockney man, strolling along in Cockney London," pointed out their client, 'Cockney Jim'. "He wouldn't be surprised to find some Cockney cheese ? Would he ?"
Er... no.

The Persuasionists stars Adam Buxton, Jarred Christmas, Simon Farnaby, Iain Lee, Lee Ross, and is written by Jonathan Thake. Boys, your friends are embarrassed to know you.

Considering the daftness of the advertising industry, it is surprising that it has inspired so few comedies. The Persuasionists, a six-part sitcom starring Jarred Christmas which starts tonight, redresses this balance. The ad world is peculiarly suited to comedy treatment, complete with outrageous personalities, facile themes, a frenetic pace and a limitless supply of colourful "visiting" personalities (to pep up each episode). In the series, which is written by Jonathan Thake (who used to work in an ad agency) and produced by the company responsible for The Inbetweeners, such outlandish characters are well represented: there's a sexual predator, a brainy loser, a neurotic female executive, a bullish boss and witless account director. The agency is called HHH&H, a wry reference to the vain habit among marketeers of forming their agencies' names around their initials. In tonight's episode, Greg (the witless one, played by Adam Buxton) must pitch a sub-standard campaign for brown, pungent "Cockney cheese" ("for empty nesters who like dairy products") to an antagonistic client Jim, played by Lee Ross. The presentation goes terribly and the team has to use cunning to win over the client, enlisting a female team member as a "honey trap". It all goes desperately wrong and concludes with a booze-stoked confrontation. It's light, sometimes entertaining, vacuous stuff - like the industry it depicts. Just try to ignore the overdone canned laughter.

Set in the world of advertising, this new sitcom has its own unique selling point: it's approximately one-third funny. The third succeeds because every time Simon Farnaby steps in as sex-crazed international fixer, Keaton, it's to do something hilarious with a big pencil. The rest fails because the other execs (Adam Buxton, Iain Lee, Jarred Christmas and Daisy Haggard) are something-and-nothing characters, and fail to add anything clever or convincing to the flabbier bits of the script. Nevertheless, there are some genuinely good ideas here, and the team's battle to put together a convincing campaign for a new product, cockney cheese, is leavened by the presence of guest star Lee Ross. He makes a marvellous cockney, possibly because until recently he played Denise's ex, Owen, in EastEnders.

When American scriptwriters decided to put the advertising world on telly, they gave us the perfectly scripted and critically acclaimed Mad Men. This side of the pond we end up with The Persuasionists, which follows the more traditional vein of Brit sitcoms.

It's often said advertising execs have no idea what they're doing and the five idiots in this certainly live up to that image. They work for HHH&H and have to come up with a clever campaign for Cockney Cheese, a bizarre brown cheese that smells of something incredibly unpleasant (I won't spoil the revelation - it's almost certain to give you a chuckle). Creative Billy (Iain Lee, in his first acting role) has come up with a slogan and it's up to uncertain Greg (Adam Buxton) to sell it to the client, Cockney Jim.

Trouble is, he's terrified of Jim, a caricature of an EastEnders baddie... played by former EastEnders baddie Lee Ross (he was Owen Turner). And unlike one colleague, Greg doesn't have a giant pencil to save the day (that's not a euphemism - one of them really has a giant pencil).

The series is written by former ad man Jonathan Thake, who was responsible for Pot Noodle's "the slag of all snacks" campaign, one of the most complained-about TV ads of all time. I'd love to have seen how he managed to sell this little show to the Beeb.

The Persuasionists Review: Unpersuasive

Episode 1 sees the adcentrics trying to sell a brown smelly 'cockney cheese' for disillusioned client Jim (Lee Ross), who is so cockney it hurts (though just enough for Emma). Cue hilarious chaos. Something definitely smells off to me. Though sadly, it's not only the storyline that stinks.