Video Arts: “Assert yourself”
From the wiki:
Video Arts is a British-based video production company which produces training videos for companies. It was founded in 1972 by John Cleese and a group of other television professionals. The videos are noted for using humour to explain business concepts and for featuring well-known British actors. Past productions have featured Cleese, Dawn French, Prunella Scales, Hugh Laurie, and Robert Hardy.
Cleese sold the company in 2007, presumably before this one was made, so don’t watch it because it’s relatively crap, but here’s one from the 90s which features Cleese as St. Peter offering a postmortem to a recently deceased unorganized manager. It’s called “The unorganised [sic] manager” whose laptop is comically enormous.
And here’s one from what appears to be the heyday of Video Arts featuring a very Archie Leach-like Cleese as a salaryman fed up with the inanity of meetings. It’s titled “Meetings, Bloody Meetings”.
Two observations: 1) There are clearly giant piles of cash to be made from producing entertaining and tasteful vignettes for corporate use. A quick look at the catalogue shows that most of these pieces can be purchased for something insane like a grand or four for a DVD or e-learning CD-ROM. Serious cash. 2) It’s hard not to think that ‘The Office’ may have taken a cue or two from Video Arts’ astute lampooning of the corporate culture.
