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Palma.—The observational documentary series, Our Man In... is coming soon to Channel 4 and follows the working lives of British Consuls and their staff in Spain in some of the busiest offices in the world - Alicante, Ibiza, Majorca, Barcelona and Tenerife - as they cope with everything British holiday makers and expatriates throw at them.

The British Consul to the Balearics and Malta, Paul Abrey and his team here in Palma run one of the busiest consulates in the world, never mind Spain.
13 million Britons
Spain receives more than 13 million British visitors every year, and has more than 800'000 British residents.
The British consular staff deal with nearly 12'000 cases a year. “Everyone's story is different - some have been unlucky, others careless, some criminal and some just plain silly - and consular staff are left to pick up the pieces of wrecked holidays, car crashes, crime incidents, drunken binges, deaths and the 101 things that can go wrong when Britons go abroad,” said Channel 4 in a press release about the programme. “They (the Consulate staff) are the people who will help when holiday makers and expatriates have no one else to turn to, can not speak the language and are generally at their wit's end,” according to Channel 4's press release.

Our Man In joins the staff on the front line as they deal with the huge number of cases they are confronted with during the height of the summer holiday season, and the cameras accompany them whether they are visiting police cells, prisons, hospitals or hotels, 24 hours a day. To make the three one hour long episodes Channel 4 were granted exclusive access to the British consulates and this has meant that Channel 4 were able to film “never-seen-before” footage for the series which is due to be screened shortly and narrated by actor Bill Nighy.