Processing Britain: Department Without Practicality
Processing Britain: A Satire of Bureaucracy, Banter, and Breakdown
Dovegate isn't just an office. It's a monument to inefficiency, a government processing centre where logic goes to die and acronyms breed like rabbits. On paper, it has structure. In reality, it's a jelly pyramid wobbling on the edge of collapse.
At the top sits Siobhan, a manager so absent she might be a hologram. Beneath her lurk Alishia and her lieutenants Zara, Angel, and later Clara, "The Plastics", ruling through gossip, intimidation, and the kind of "wellbeing initiatives" that feel like psychological warfare.
Into this chaos stumbles Mike, our reluctant narrator. Promoted into Business Support - the one team holding Dovegate together, he finds himself juggling absurd responsibilities: training hopeless newbies, fixing systems that break daily, hoarding stationery like gold, and writing newsletters nobody reads. Alongside Simone, his long-suffering manager-turned-surrogate "Dad," and a cast of eccentrics (Zammit, Stewart, Jill, Christian the human sunbeam, and Tinder-obsessed Jan), Mike tries to keep the ship afloat while management drills holes in the hull.
From "wellbeing" AO conferences designed to flush out complainers, to duplicate pensioners who somehow clone themselves into three separate identities, Dovegate veers between sitcom and horror show. Every small victory is stolen by management, every grievance mishandled by HR, every new hire either devoured or corrupted.
The office staggers on, triumphant in failure.
Bleak, hilarious, and painfully recognisable, Processing Britain is not a story of heroes beating the system. It's a story of surviving it - with sarcasm, gallows humour, and the faint hope of a working stapler.
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