There is a funny moment in the middle of this behind-the-scenes documentary. It is a small tear in the fabric of discretion, a tiny betrayal, where the programme-makers come close to getting a piece of what they came for.
It takes place during an interview with Ian McCafferty, who at the time is a member of the Bank Of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. The conversation takes place in McCafferty’s office, and it takes its power from the fact that it isn’t a conversation at all.
What happens is this. McCafferty invites the camera into his office. It is a boring room, apart from the unremarked fact that the economist keeps a bundle of pencils, held together with a rubber band. At a guess, he has about 30 of them in a clump.
But why? Is he following the advice of Jeffrey Archer, who used to write his novels by laying out 30 pencils and using a fresh one to write every day, so that after a month, including breaks for lunch, he had produced a blockbuster? Or is being a member of the Monetary Committee a bit like that episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza just started turning up for work at an office with no idea of what to do, and spent a whole week transferring the contents of a file to a flexible accordion-style folder?
No, being a member of the Monetary Committee isn’t a bit like that. It’s tough, important work. But it is boring. Very boring. And these, we must assume, are the charismatic bankers, the ones who were picked to humanise the work of being boring on behalf of the British economy.
Anyway, back to that oddly empty office, with its in-tray, its out-tray, and that mysterious ball of pencils. “I collect economic cartoons,” says Mr McCafferty, gesturing towards the wall, where his favourite hangs in a frame. From the style, it seems to be a cartoon by the great Ray Lowry. It shows “two men on the classic cartoon desert island,” McCafferty says. “One looks to the other, and says “No no no no. First we will stabilise the money supply. Then we will signal the ship.’”
At this point, the economist looks to the filmmaker in the expectation of rescue, or even acknowledgement. Three seconds go by, slowly and silently. “For economists,” McCafferty offers, “that’s, you know, quite an amusing cartoon.”
Hopefully, McCafferty has learned his lesson, and will be less agreeable the next time he encounters a documentary crew. Everyone else in this film is entirely on point, knowing as they do that even the slightest hint of untamed humanity from a bank employee could plunge the economic system into turmoil.
There is, it’s true, a flicker of interest when chief cashier Victoria Cleland opens a box containing £1 million notes, and even a £100 million note, used, she says, to ensure Scottish banks remain solvent. And there’s a thrilling behind-the-scenes sequence in which the space between the jam jars on the bank’s breakfast table is measured by a man with a ruler. The jam must be a regulated distance from the bank’s Governor, Mark Carney, leaving him free to offer reassuring homilies about conventional horizons, while denying he is — in the rib-tickling comic jargon of economists — an unreliable boyfriend.
Inside the Bank of England is on BBC Two at 9.30pm tonight.
