The Hotel Inspector Returns; Majesty and Mortar: Britain's Great Palaces – TV review

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/26/hotel-inspector-returns-majesty-mortar-tv-review

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Alex Polizzi is back in The Hotel Inspector Returns (Channel 5), which might be better described as The Hotel Inspector Repeats, since the bulk of the programme is made up of footage from a previous series, with Polizzi dropping by towards the end to see how things have come on since.

Actually, the return works rather well in this case, because turning around a failing hotel – or failing to – takes the sort of time that TV producers can't spare. The original broadcast is tidily compressed into highlights, and the intervening gap provides a reveal worth revealing (this is also often true of Grand Designs Revisited). As for going over old ground, if you are lucky, you won't remember the programme from the first time around, or you won't have seen it or, like me, you won't even remember which.

It's been two years since Polizzi first turned up at the Meudon Hotel in Cornwall, an underperforming family concern run by father-and-son team Harry and Mark Pilgrim. The Meudon had many assets, including extensive gardens and a private beach, but it suffered from tired decor, a weird pricing structure (standard room £110 per night, per person) and terrible food. "The AA took away our rosette a long time ago," said Harry, "and have not given it back."

Unusually for this type of reality TV, Mark already had a firm grasp of the nature of the Meudon's difficulties. "It's probably fair to say that our customer base is between 60 and dead," he told Polizzi. The elderly Harry, meanwhile, perfectly understood his role as a reality TV subject: "She's probably going to suggest a lot of changes that, after 40 years, I'm not to keen to do," he said. Yup, that's pretty much the way it works.

Polizzi, who also doubles as "The Fixer" on BBC2, is not an interventionist of the Gordon Ramsay stripe. She is forthright, but she does not bully. She smiles, calls people darling a lot and is wont to lay a hand on a sagging shoulder. I'm pretty sure she could convince me to borrow an enormous amount of money from the bank just by looking at me with understanding eyes.

She can, however, be sniffy about fixtures and fittings. "The decorator deserves to be bitch-slapped," she said, which was the type of remark we were still tolerating two years ago. How far we have come.

A family business is, of course, a family drama, which is The Hotel Inspector's principal advantage. Harry the father is resistant to change and unwilling to relinquish the reins to his son. Mark, in turn, has the weary air and resigned wit of a hostage to inheritance: he has nowhere to go but nowhere. "No matter how far you climb up the managerial ladder," he says, "your hand is never far from the S-bend." Everyone can relate to that, even people who have had the foresight not to run a failing hotel.

It's amazing how many essentially existential problems can be solved by ripping up some swirly carpet and hanging new curtains. And, as it turns out, by having Mark's sister Gaye step in and run the place. Gaye had apparently not set foot in the hotel in 15 years but, after the first programme, was moved to stage an intervention of her own, effectively retiring the old man and transferring Mark's talents to the garden. Now that he only has to be nice to plants, Mark seems very happy.

"Lovely, darling!" said Polizzi as she toured the revamped Meudon. And it is – clean, neutral, wedding-friendly. A scrap of the horrible carpet remains in reception, but the curtains, the pink wallpaper, the wonky bedside tables and Mark and Harry's mildly toxic working relationship are all gone, and I, for one, am a little bit bereft.

Over on BBC4, Dan Cruickshank is inspecting royal palaces, looking with a kinder eye on both the careworn and the out of place, from the abandoned grace-and-favour apartments of Hampton Court to the bemusing interactive displays currently gracing Kensington Palace. In this, the middle instalment of Majesty and Mortar: Britain's Great Palaces, Cruickshank examined royalty tourism, which really got going in the Victorian era but has its roots in the Restoration, when Charles II assembled a bunch of old armour into a historical parade called the Line of Kings. The armour sat astride wooden horses carved, said Cruickshank, by grinning gibbons. I made a note of that interesting fact, which I thought important to pass on, once I'd checked that apes of the family Hylobatidae were both capable of delicate woodcarving and only too happy to engage in it. Of course, he actually said Grinling Gibbons, referring to the 17th-century sculptor whose work is all over St Paul's cathedral. Thank you, the internet.