An evening at Sainsbury's

The Channel 4 television programme I'm Running Sainsbury's was the first of four hour-long documentaries made for C4 by Daisy Goodwin (whose track record includes hits like How Clean is Your House?, Jamie's Kitchen and Property Ladder.) The idea was a sort of company suggestions box crossed with The Apprentice.

In the first film, Becky Craze, a store trainer at Sainsbury's in Watford, won a staff competition for bright ideas. Becky believed - sensibly, you'd think - that Sainsbury's would sell more of the ingredients of its Feed Your Family for a Fiver recipes if they were all put in a handy bag, to save customers having to traipse round collecting them.

The programme showed Becky's idea being tried out for a week. But it didn't take off, leaving her, like a Cinderella who didn't meet her prince, to return to the shop floor.

Along the way, we were treated to many familiar scenes from this kind of TV: the 'tension' of waiting to find out whether her idea would be picked; her hopes for a new and better life if it all worked out; the panel of executives in a boardroom at HQ pronouncing judgment on her efforts; the struggle to make it work; tears and elation at appropriate points; Becky being sent out of the room while her superiors made their final judgment; her dejected return home (but no interview in the cab); and, finally, the traditional documentary symbol of all being well - the outing to the bowling alley with her friends.

So far, so good - if you like that sort of thing. But the programme was breaking new ground in its intimate connection with one of Channel 4's biggest advertisers. Sainsbury's own website had a page about the series, on which Channel 4's description of the programme was only marginally doctored:

"Chief Executive, Justin King, has come up with a plan. He believes that somewhere on the shop floor there is a colleague with a real big idea. He has decided to allow four colleagues the opportunity to take up the power to try their ideas across the business. Their aim to make a difference to the business and serve customers even better."

Along with full details of Becky's recipe, Sainsbury's website had this statement from its chief executive:

"We took part in this documentary series because the idea at the heart of the four programmes is also a fundamental principle of our business - that great ideas can come from anyone in any part of the company."

But, hang on, I thought Mr King had "come up with a plan", not just agreed to a proposal put to him by a TV production company?

It's an important distinction - between a documentary, in the sense of a record of something that's happening, and a reality show, in which everyone has agreed to take part in events orchestrated for the purpose of a programme.

The evidence of last night suggested I'm Running Sainsbury's was more the latter: after all, if Sainsbury's was really just looking for good ideas from its staff it wouldn't have needed Becky to design new recipes (why not just use the old ones?) or to organise the implementation.

And if it really wanted to give staff a chance like that, presumably her efforts would go into things like designing the bags (of which we saw nothing) rather than the recipes - which threatened to take us into another well-known TV genre.

It's true that the distinction between reality and documentary can be blurred: a viewer of The Apprentice might theoretically wonder at Sir Alan Sugar's extraordinarily elaborate recruitment process.

But there is an important difference between the two series. Sir Alan is committed to hiring a candidate, so there is something at stake for him as well as for them. In the Sainsbury's programme it was hard to see any risk for Sainsbury's in return for having its name and its stores on screen for most of an hour. It was seen to be giving its staff a chance (what a nice employer!), and if the ideas didn't come up to scratch the staff member still had a job to go back to, and therefore was likely to put a positive spin on the story.

Sainsbury's is clearly delighted with the outcome: it is paying for a sponsored Google link to the series page on its website which pops up when you search on the programme name.

As for viewers, well, more of them were off in another part of the high street, watching Mary Portas on Mary Queen of Charity Shops on BBC2 (2.6 million), leaving Sainsbury's with 1.6 million.