Sir Gerry Robinson is to return to TV in a series in which he will both advise failing private firms and put investment into them, I can reveal. The series will air on Channel 4 next year and no one is prepared to say much about it, but discreet soundings have appeared in the trade press asking for victims, sorry, candidates.

There is as yet no working title, and Gogglebox Entertainment, the independent TV company making the programmes, directs my inquiries to Channel 4. “It's an early-stage development for us,” 4 tells me. “That's about all I can tell you.”

Sectors identified so far for the series are hotels and catering, construction and manufacturing, and Robinson is seeking businesses with annual turnover exceeding £500,000 “which he thinks deserve a second chance”. He is best known on our screens for I'll Show Them Who's Boss, in which he demonstrated to various family firms where they were going wrong.

I imagine potential applicants this time must be weighing the public embarrassment against that cash injection. “All inquiries will be treated in strict confidence,” promises Gogglebox. Yes, I can see why.

Honesty is his best policy

As if things could not get worse for that unfortunate island in the North Atlantic, I see that the collapse of the Icelandic krona has attracted the attention of cheap holiday companies. I am offered a two-night stay plus flights, emphasising how cheap the beer is. You even get a discount on Reykjavik's best boutiques and shops. “We have also been approached by tour operators for an increase in allocation of seats,” says the island's low-fare airline. The tourists will flood in. The Icelandic capital as the new Prague, full of drunk stag night parties?

One or two of Sir Fred “the Shred” Goodwin's former colleagues have been in touch. Oh, yes. As a letter in The Herald pointed out after his “surprise” move to the Royal Bank of Scotland from the Clydesdale in 1998, “all of this came as no surprise. Very soon after his arrival at 30 St Vincent Place, Glasgow [the Clydesdale HQ], the vast majority of senior staff consoled themselves with the view that at least he wouldn't be around for long and how right they all proved to be.” One of Fred the Shred's contributions to the Clydesdale, where he earned his nickname, turned out to be the obliteration of various staff aged over 50 - precisely those who knew best what a banking cycle was.

A sign that we are through the worst? I am told by my man there that yesterday was the first day in a fortnight that film crews were not parked outside Mansion House for interviews across the square at the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England beyond. It's when they stop turning up at the London Stock Exchange at Paternoster Square that we'll know we're out of the woods.

Half the City has clearly too much to do, half has nothing whatsoever to do. I have just had lunch cancelled by a market operator who cannot risk leaving the office for half an hour - and who can blame him?

Yet Prism, one of the City's poshest restaurants, was only a third-full yesterday lunchtime. Meanwhile, at The Ivy, the virtually unbookable hang-out of the media, they are running two sittings at lunchtime and there are plenty of investment bankers and other schmoozers in evidence.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, is one of the few who will walk away from the current upheaval relatively unscathed, having acquired

Bear Stearns for buttons - although he could probably have reduced the price to a half-button and a bent paperclip. Speaking at a conference at the Harvard Business School to celebrate its 100th birthday, he said that at an in-house presentation, one JPMorgan staffer had moved to boost morale. His first slide read: “JPMorgan Chase - We Suck Less.” Honest enough. Dimon added, on the theme of honesty: “You need to have one true teller ... If there are ten people in the room and there is only one true teller, you should sack the other nine.”

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