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It Starts with Little White Lies

This weekend, I have mostly been wondering how Julia Sawalha manages to keep her job. Perhaps you’re not familar with the advertising campaign for catalogue-based retailer Argos, in which she stars as hapless PA to Richard E. Grant’s ageing, but clearly very wealthy rock star. There’s been a whole series of ads, and usually the concept involves her covering up for some mistake or other by lying to her boss with the aid of shabby Argos furniture. This all started when she couldn’t be bothered to redecorate his house properly, so popped out for some cheap crap from Argos instead. One small white lie later (telling him it was all created by the fictional designer Arguus), and she’s up to her neck in it, forced to continue to fill his house with poor quality flat packed furniture whenever he asks after said designer.

The latest episode in the series has perhaps the worst example yet of her deception: it opens at an auction, where “Elvis’s fridge” is being sold. Julia puts in the opening bid, at £100,000, but then her phone goes off. It’s Richard E Grant phoning to see how she’s getting on, and while she’s on the phone to him, she is outbid by the chap behind her. But that’s no problem for Julia–she just pops down to Argos and picks up a suspiciously similar looking fridge, and Richard never suspects a thing.

There are two problems with this. The first is that Elvis died almost 30 years ago, and I would have thought that fridge technology might have moved on a tad in the meantime. What Argos seem to be implying is that the Electrical equipment they sell is the same as you could have bought in the 1970s. Well, no wonder it’s cheap.

But the main problem is that Richard E Grant thinks he’s paid over £100,000 for the fridge, while his PA has just popped down to Argos and bought a cheap similar one for a couple of hundred quid. What did she do with the other £99,500?

So clearly the message here is that if you want to defraud your employer out of a significant sum of money, while buying ancient electrical goods, Argos is the one for you.