When you fall asleep,
you are unaware of sleeping until you awake.
During those missing hours a whole other world comes alive.
Welcome to the night shift.
My name is Ben Willis.
And three nights a week, I work the late shift at Sainsbury's.
For me, the supermarket is a trading facility.
Apart from the obvious trade in food and household products,
the supermarket trades in time.
During the hours most normal people are sleeping,
I'm trading my time.
I trade this time for money.
I give them eight hours,
and they give me money.
Cashback.
- Hi Ben. - Oh, hi.
I'm late again.
Jenkins is gonna kill me.
See you later.
Yeah, see you.
- Sharon! - Yes, Mr. Jenkins.
- Late again, Sharon. - I'm sorry, Mr. Jenkins.
Second time this week.
I know, Mr. Jenkins. I'm sorry, it won't happen again.
All right. OK...
This eight hour trade gives me the money I need to pay my way through art college,
when most of my first year was devoted to the fundamentals of still life.
Well, don't just stare at it Ben.
Clean it up!
I've always wanted to be a painter.
And like many artists before me the female form has always been
a great source of fascination.
I've always been in awe of the power they unknowingly possess.
Now are you going to clean them up or not?
This is Sharon Pintey.
Sharon knows that there's an art to dealing with an eight-hour shift.
An art to putting your mind somewhere else so that it becomes unaware of the trade off.
All the people that work here perfect their own individual art.
Sharon knows rule number one.
The clock is the enemy. The basic rule is this:
The more you look at the clock, the slower the times goes.
It will uncover the hiding place of your mind and torture it with every second.
This is the basic art in dealing with the trade of your time.
Any cashback?
This is Barry Brickman.
You see Barry thinks of himself as a bit of a daredevil stuntman.
For a start, Barry is quite well known.
When one of Barry's bike tricks went wrong,
the cameraman put it on the internet.
Barry has stuck to his scooter ever since.
Matt Stephens is also a keen scooterer.
What was the other thing?
Sausage.
Oh yeah.
- Now Barry and Matt are good friends. - There you go.
Between them, they have come up with a very different way of dealing with the trade of their time.
- Barry. - What?
Look.
There's an art of finding anything to do that isn't work.
That was their final warning for pursuing something to do other than their job.
A few weeks earlier, Barry and Matt had been reported for what they called
"helping the ladies".
It was these shampoo bottles that sent them on their quest.
Barry and Matt knew what they look like...
and they knew that the women in the supermarket knew what they looked like.
Their theory was that even though it was a sex toy masquerading as a bottle of shampoo,
women would like to try it as a sex toy but were embarrassed to buy it,
because they knew what it looked like.
The decision to buy it would be an easier one if they were already at the checkout.
If they didn't object then Barry and Matt knew they helped the bottle to find an happy home.
But what they didn't know, was that the bottle was the best selling shampoo on the market.
Barry had challenged Matt to a scooter race in which they would sprint down one aisle and up the next.
They would do all 14 alleys and then back to the starting line.
They had been waiting for the day the manager called in sick.
The art of doing something else other than the work you're supposed to do is addictive.
The excitement of doing something that you shouldn't be doing
along with the consequences if you're caught doing it
are so strong that it often pulls others away from their own art.
On your marks...
get set...
go!
When you've perfected the art of placing your mind somewhere else,
eight hours will go as fast as this.
Time manipulation is not a precise science.
Like any art, it's personal to the individual.
Send them out into the world, fulfilled and joyful…
But you are the one.
I gotta tell you Sharon, I'm a modest guy. I felt fantastic.
I look beautiful.
Throw this in your face?
You inspire me. Perhaps more than I inspire myself...
Yeah, you're lucky.
On a bench, with the boys,
I felt like a god. I'm an Adonis.
I keep myself in good shape, I know that.
I see the looks...
I ignore that.
You have to carry on, you know? You have to strive.
Make your own mark.
I feel like that. I feel like a real man.
I think you like real men, don't you?
There's something supreme...
So what is the art in making my shift go so fast?
I imagine the opposite.
The time is frozen.
I imagine that the remote control for life has been paused.
Within this frozen world I'm able to work freely and unnoticed.
Nobody would even know that the time had stopped.
And when it start to back up again the invisible join would be seamless except for a slight shudder.
Not unlike the feeling of somebody walking over your grave.
That moment...
when you see somebody walking down the street who's so beautiful that you just can't help but stare.
Well imagine as I do, that with a world on pause
it becomes very easy to understand the concept of beauty,
to have it frozen in front of you,
that precise moment captured.
Unawares.
For me this fascination with beauty started at a very young age.
I was 6 or 7 and my mum and dad had taken on a foreign student.
She was in her late teens and was studying English at a near by school.
Being Swedish, the walk from the shower to her room didn't need to be a modest one.
It was at that moment that something very profound happened to me.
I was exposed to the female form in a way I had never experienced.
I felt fascination and wonder at the beauty of her nakedness,
and I wanted to freeze the world so I could live in that moment for a week.
I've never had a feeling of such completeness.
To this day, I still think it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.
You dropped these.
And would it be wrong?
Would they hate me?
For seeing them.
I mean really seeing them.
I read once about a woman whose secret fantasy was to have an affair with an artist.
She thought that he would really see her.
He would see every curve,
every line,
every indentation and love them because they were part of beauty that made her unique.
And when I'm ready, the only thing I need to do to start time again...
is crack my fingers.
Barry!