The Most Popular Man in Lyon
Gilbert Peyrat has been the night porter at a Lyon hotel for twenty-two years. He comes on at ten, lets in the bread at half past four, and has watched eleven thousand people cross a lobby without being looked at directly by more than one in forty of them.
Then a casting agent comes in to collect a folder that isn't at reception, spends eleven minutes waiting, and looks at the staff photograph on the noticeboard behind the desk.
Bertrand Chazal runs a food group with eleven thousand employees and forty-one sites. He knows the business better than his own directors. He cannot stand in a room and be looked at, and at sixty-one he has stopped expecting to learn. So his communications director builds a grid with four categories, and category three - presence only - goes to a double.
Gilbert is paid four hundred euros a day to cut ribbons, walk production lines, and say nothing. He is given nine laminated sentences. He keeps the night job.
And at his first appearance, with the extraction manoeuvre already in motion, he asks a woman in a hi-vis what her son does - and the whole apparatus stops.
A comedy about corporate ventriloquism, and about what happens when eleven thousand people meet somebody from the top of their company who has nowhere else to be.
From the author of Table Eleven, Nothing to Declare and The Kindest Man in Ghent.
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