Alex Polizzi, AKA the Fixer, AKA the Hotel Inspector, has taken on a more noble – if no less frustrating – mission than dispensing tough love to hopeless B&B owners. In Alex Polizzi: Hire Our Heroes (BBC2), she means to put Britain’s unemployed veterans back to work.
It’s a big problem: there are an estimated 120,000 unemployed vets of working age in the UK. Many have applied for hundreds of jobs, but their training isn’t necessarily as transferable as you’d imagine.
“The fact is I have no technical skills,” said Jamie. “I’m a Royal Marine and my job was to stick bayonets in people.” Jamie now has a job – recruiting other ex-military applicants for building company Skanska – but he struggled, even after coming out of service physically and mentally unscathed. One in 25 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are discharged with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I remember that bloke, but I’m not him anymore,” said ex-guardsman Phil, looking at an old picture of himself. In addition to having PTSD, Phil is an amputee. He was also a pallbearer at Princess Diana’s funeral.
Polizzi was trying to mentor a clutch of veterans into work by brushing up their jobseeking skills. Often they will have been to just one interview in their lives, when they signed up. They may be disciplined and fastidious – one telling scene showed tank regiment veteran Lee checking the margin of his CV with a tape measure – but they’re also a bit defeated.
Anyone who’s seen her present a programme knows Polizzi is at her best when someone dares to disappoint her, but this challenge presented graver frustrations. She managed to get Lee a work placement, but he stopped showing up after three days. His PTSD had returned, and Polizzi’s confidence wavered. “Is it even appropriate to be putting these guys into employment?” she said.
But she’s not giving up (there’s a part two next week), and whatever her results, she deserves credit for highlighting this crisis. More than one of the veterans she spoke to said they primarily wanted a job because they needed a reason to get up in the morning.
