Copacabana Palace; Man vs Weird – TV review

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/13/copacabana-palace-man-vs-weird-tv-review

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British businessman Benjamin Bowen and his bichon frise Lady Bella are living alliteratively and indefinitely at the extravagant, luxurious Copacabana Palace hotel in Rio de Janeiro. Why? One – because they can, even at $800 a night, and two, because only the Copacabana would prepare his room by framing a picture of Lady Bella ("I don't even know where they got it from!") for his bedside table and include bottles of shampoo and conditioner for white dogs in his basketful of bathroom toiletries. Cologne too, but Bowen came supplied with her favourite. "It's called 'Eau my God'!" he explained, which was roughly what everyone else was thinking too.

Last night's This World film, Copacabana Palace (BBC2), about the legendary 90-year-old Brazilian hotel immortalised by Fred and Ginger in the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio, billed itself as a look at the changing fortunes of a country through one of its landmark buildings. It turned out to be mostly a look at the infinitely strange lives of infinitely wealthy people such as Bowen, interspersed with a few minutes about the lives of the 600-plus staff who travel in from the poor outlying favelas to cater to the guests' every whim.

On this evidence, the hotel did not mirror the country's evolution beyond the ways any niche or luxury business mirrors its times. When the tourism industry took off and the economy boomed, so did the hotel. Early on in its history, it was the favoured haunt of Hollywood stars and glamorous high-stakes gamblers who flocked to the casino there. From the 60s to the 80s, when Brazil was under military dictatorship and Rio de Janeiro was a byword for South American poverty and violence, takings dipped a bit. Now its main clientele are mega-rich businessmen like Bowen and just enough "very VIPs", as Anne Phillips called them as she reverently opened the hotel's "Golden Book", bearing witness to the temporary housing of the likes of Robert De Niro, Madonna, Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus within its gleaming, marbled walls, to sprinkle a little stardust over the experience. And the whole country is looking forward to a huge influx of visitors, and a rise in employment and earning opportunities, when they host the World Cup in June and the Olympics in 2016.

Nor does the way it operates differ significantly from the way any hotel works. Those who stay there are relatively wealthy. Those who serve them are not. In Rio, the staff are delayed by gunfights between drug gangs or, if they are lucky, between drug gangs and police blocking their routes to work, and they rarely earn more than the minimum wage (taking home around £70 a week) once they get there. There's less armed warfare in the streets here in Europe of course, and in most parts of America, but otherwise the picture is the same the world over. There wasn't enough emphasis on this common and well-known phenomenon to lift the film much above a point-gasp-envy! look at the way the other 0.1% live. And that, frankly, has been done.

The only remotely edifying thing was the realisation, as Bowen turned up at a surprise birthday party thrown for him by the hotel with just other guests and staff in attendance, that while we ordinary mortals might turn up at a luxury hotel as the result of a fervent desire to escape from our families for 24 hours, the financial elite more often seem to turn up in the hope of buying a simulacrum of domestic bliss. Still, you felt, Bowen might be a bit lonely, but at least he wasn't stuck in a one-room, two-mattress shack with three children to care for alone like his chambermaid Viviane was. Maybe he'll give her Lady Bella's unused cologne when he leaves. Eau my God, what a world.

Man vs Weird (Channel 4), in which comedian Simon Farnaby goes in search of people claiming superhuman powers, also left you feeling there might be a lot to recommend life as a rich man's bichon frise rather than as a member of the 99.9% not holed up in the Copacabana Palace. The opening episode of this new series found three "human magnets" and one human electricity conductor. They were all from poor villages in eastern Europe and the dearth of opportunities that makes polarising cutlery or passing a million volts through your already-scarred flesh seem like a terrific career move was apparent. But there wasn't enough social commentary or, failing that, informed scepticism about the claims themselves to make it savour of anything other than a dribble of Eau So Pointless.