For Nigel Freeman -- the oldest, iratest man in marketing and always looking for an argument -- life's just got tougher: he's lost his job.
Fifty-something Nigel Freeman is hanging on. A natural worrier and late arriver on to the fitness and sensible food treadmill, Nigel feels he'll now have to hold down his job into his late sixties as a result of his pension fund having gone belly up. Nigel is not having an easy time and a lot of the world is to blame for this.
Nigel worries about his kids, living in Norway with his estranged wife. He feels he's letting them down by not being with them enough. He has also, as a result of an impulse trip to Spain, committed himself to Channel Four's programme for dreamers: a Spanish home in the sun. Because he sees himself as being marginalised at work, everybody else is to blame for that, too. Add in the fact that he's bored because the company he works for doesn't allow him to do a good job...
Nigel wants a 'managed' way out of his well-paid but dislikeable and diginity-free job into something which can still allow him to eat, pay the mortgage and see his kids? Getting unexpectedly sacked means he has three short and possibly unmanageable months to do this.