Secret life of office 'plants'

Zellweger: Nice work if you can get it

Are colleagues acting strangely at work? Are they making more notes than usual, asking questions about how things work and actually paying attention to the boss, writes Chris Horrie.

If so, perhaps they are not colleagues at all.

I've rather enjoyed that, actually, it's the first time I've used my college degree

Zellweger on her time as office worker 'Bridget Cavendish'

Quite possibly they are undercover Hollywood method actors, writers of neo-realist novels, investigative journalists, plain-clothes detectives, company stool pigeons or sojourning sociologists planted in the office so they can gather material.

Bridget Jones

Take the case of London publishing company Picador. Some employees thought that the new work experience girl who arrived at the office last year looked a bit like American movie actress Renée Zellweger, star of the film version of Bridget Jones's Diary, which is on general release next week.

Zellweger as Bridget Jones

In fact the "work experience girl" was Renée Zellweger - researching the role of Bridget who, in the diary, works in a similar office.

So that people would react to her in a normal and natural way, Zellweger's real identity was kept secret. Realism extended to Zellweger's assumed identity. She posed as Bridget Cavendish, sister of the company chairman's best friend.

But it is not merely clandestine blonde bombshell Hollywood movie stars who infest the modern workplace.

Realism

The trend for artists and entertainers to slum it with ordinary folks has roots going back at least to 19th century France when novelist Emile Zola famously spent a lot of time down coal mines and hanging around in morgues so that he could add realism to his work.

Later, sociologists got in on the act. It was reckoned that by the 1920s, as many as one in 10 of all employees at the Ford motor company were undercover sociologists noting every detail of what production line workers did - and how long they took to do it.

Work Town

In the England of the 1930s, a peculiar group of egg-heads set up the Mass Observation organisation, which involved sending Oxbridge educated volunteers to live and work in factory and mill towns to see how the other half lived.

One result was "Work Town" - a massive study of the people of Bolton recording everything from what they said in the pub to the exact way TB victims spat into their personalised buckets of disinfectant.

Mass Observation's work led directly to the advent of the gritty, realistic documentary and - more recently - to "fly on the wall" and "reality" television shows - all dedicated to the paranoid principle that other people are really much more weird and interesting than you think they are, once you get to know them.

The trend got another boost in the 1960s when spies of all sorts were dispatched to report from the front-line of the burgeoning hippy counter-culture.

Fear and Loathing

Alongside the inevitable undercover drugs cops a small army of "participant observation" sociology students joined the "scene", joined by undercover "new wave" journalists eager to write about them from the inside.

The real thing - Johnny Depp, star of the movie version of Hunter S Thompson's "Fear and Loathing"

Leading the way was author Hunter S Thompson who tried to pass himself off as a hippy posing as drug squad officer posing as hippy while, all the time, under the influence of massive quantities of drugs and booze. The result was the classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The top-selling American novelist Tom Wolfe likewise pretended to be a hippy and spent a year travelling around America in order to write his seminal account of the psychedelic 1960s The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test.

Most probably the hippies were too stoned to notice the erudite figure of Wolfe sitting at the back of the bus getting everything down in shorthand. But they got their revenge by spiking his drink with LSD.

Later Wolfe worked undercover in a newspaper office and on Wall Street in order to write Bonfire of the Vanities.

Investigative

Other types of journalists - more interested in landing a hard edge scoop than painting a picture of society and manners - soon got in on the act.

Acid wit - Fake hippy and stockbroker Tom Wolfe melted into the background

Gunter Wallraff, the German investigative journalist led the way by getting a job as a cleaner in a nuclear power plant in order to gather evidence that it was not safe. Then he posed as an international arms dealer in order to flush out neo-fascist terrorists.

These days an undercover journalist is much more likely to pose as a PR person in order to entrap a member of the Royal family or sporting star into saying something stupid and embarrassing.

So when you are going about your business, be careful.

That awkward customer on the phone who you feel like telling to take a running jump is probably a stoolie from head office checking your customer relations skills; the shifty bloke in accounts who's always proposing scams at the company's expense might be TV documentary maker with a camera in his lapel; the visiting photocopier repair man is almost certainly a covert sociology student working on his PhD.

And the rest are doubtless rehearsing for parts in movies staring their humdrum selves.