On the evidence of the first programme, BBC2's new business series I'll Show Them Who's Boss will be required viewing. Gerry Robinson, the former Granada chief, has taken on the role carved out in the 1980s and 1990s by Sir John Harvey-Jones in his Troubleshooter series.
The formula is similar: eminent corporate big shot goes in to troubled small firm to weigh up its problems and offer solutions. But Robinson is out-Harveying Sir John. The old ICI boss shocked us with his explosive neckties; Robinson injects nitroglycerine into his recommendations. Thus, in the first programme, he advises the father and son who own a Nottingham dyeing factory to sack their chief general manager, a loyal servant of 25 years' standing, and when that doesn't work, to sack the son himself.
I've yet to see the second episode, when Robinson advises a trio of brothers who own a coffee bar. But according to the Sunday Times the brothers plan to sue Robinson for stirring up fraternal tension and making them look incompetent.
Robinson is doubly compelling because he delivers his bombshells with twinkly-eyed charm and beguiling Irish blarney. His eyes are so luminously blue that I wonder whether he's wearing coloured contact lenses. He is deliciously outspoken. After the dyeing bosses rehire the general manager they'd sacked seven days earlier, he remarks: "In management terms, I've never seen anything so stupid in my life."
Robinson is the archetypal working-class Irishman made good - the ninth child of a Donegal carpenter - who convinced us that it was possible to run the largest of blue chips on just four days a week. As the new broom at Granada, he was told in a fax from John Cleese to "f*** off, you upstart caterer", a put-down that said more about the comedian than the businessman. He was the chief architect of the consolidation of ITV, taking over Yorkshire TV and London Weekend and making multimillionaires of luminaries such as Christopher Bland, Greg Dyke and Melvyn Bragg. Described as "a shark in a Val Doonican jumper", he brilliantly (if unwittingly) timed his takeover assault on the hotels group Forte on a day that its chief executive, Rocco, was on a Yorkshire grouse moor.
He remains hugely admired. But, in the City, his reputation has sagged. Granada's disastrous foray into digital TV was begun under Robinson. He has long since gone, but the collapse in the share price since his departure throws doubt over his legacy. His final act three years ago was to persuade investors to cough up £1.3bn of fresh capital: at the last count they had lost £992m of it.
Nor is he ideally qualified to advise on small businesses, given that he has spent almost all his career in very large ones, where the problems tend to be different and the personal risks much smaller.
Robinson once told his biographer Bill Kay: "I often think of the philosophy expressed in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which says that nothing matters very much and yet, because it is all we have, everything matters greatly. I have never taken life that seriously because I have the sense of it not mattering that much. But whatever you do, you must really go for it. No half-measures."
He may well be right, and sometimes the surgeon's knife is necessary. But as he cheerfully squashed the hopes and ambitions of the Nottingham factory-owners I was put in mind of a poet closer to Robinson's Irish roots: "Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams."
Modern-day shareholding reminds me of one of those delightful contraptions drawn by Heath Robinson. You know the kind of thing - "a machine for peeling a grape while lying in bed". In a ludicrously elaborate apparatus, pressing a button activates a spring, which turns a wheel, which pulls a string, which turns a dial, which moves a lever, which nudges a cog, which operates a blade that ultimately peels the grape. Beautiful on the page, immaculate in theory. Completely bonkers in practice.
So it is with pension fund members, endowment policyholders, unit trust owners and millions of other ordinary people who indirectly own UK companies. In theory they can - through the complex and lengthy mechanism of trustees, actuaries and fund managers - press a button that puts a stop to boardroom excess.
In practice it's virtually impossible. There is a chasmic disconnect between the ultimate owners of companies and their stewards. That is good news for Helen Weir, the finance director of Kingfisher, the B&Q stores group. It emerged the other day that she - in surely one of the most egregious examples of fat-cattery yet seen - was given a £334,000 "relocation allowance", on top of her £576,000 of other pay, for moving a grand total of 11 miles closer to her new office.
Patrick Hosking is deputy City editor of the London Evening Standard
