Making a good list of it
SIZE isn’t everything, but try telling that to some TV producers. There’s a certain kind of factual programme that confuses big numbers for big thrills, assuming that if you tell people a million biscuits trundle along a conveyor belt, they’ll care more than if it was 100,000, or one.
I worried that AMAZING HOTELS: LIFE BEYOND THE LOBBY (BBC2) was going to be like that, hitting us as it did with a list that included 57 storeys, 2,000 rooms and 160,000 pieces of staff uniform. The figures in question all related to the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore’s first mega hotel.
It would have been galling of course if the BBC had just sent a couple of presenters over there and let them go mad with the minibar. For that reason, Giles Coren and Monica Galetti got to experience the Marina Bay Sands from the perspective of its workers.
Monica, often seen being serious on shows such as MasterChef, quickly earnt the trust of the kitchen staff and took a vital role fashioning the thousands of dim sum dumplings consumed daily.
The staff there, from the lowliest liftboy to the haughtiest manager, have an inbuilt ability to scan everyone who steps through the revolving doors, assessing who is rich, who is slightly less rich and who will try to nick the towels.
They scanned Giles, assessed him to be a bit of a charlie, and kept a beady eye on him from then on. He was allowed to dress up as a butler, and to push a cart of fresh flowers around – but not alone.
Giles joined the fleet of valets who park the supercars of the superguests but his steely American boss rapidly decided he would only be permitted to drive an electric golf buggy.
Along the way detours were made into the experiment that is Singapore’s swankiest hotel, from the hordes of homesick Chinese filling the low-paid jobs to the space age towel washing system. More interesting than the average laundry list anyway.
I used to think solitary confinement would be my best bet for surviving a prison sentence. LAST DAYS OF SOLITARY: STORYVILLE (BBC4) relieved me of that delusion in the first minutes. This film began with the exterior of Maine State Prison and noises that could have been wolves, or an experimental theatre group, deep in the forest.
We rapidly realised it was the noise of the prison’s segregation unit whose residents howl, chant, growl and bang for want of anything better to do.
When they tire of that, they cut themselves and flood their toilets. Solitary, we were told, began as a Quaker experiment in the late 18th century, based on the idea that in silence and isolation prisoners would become pure in heart and thought, like monks.
It had become obvious by the 1830s they actually became raving mad but the practice continued, and was ramped up in US prisons in the 1970s to deal with gang violence.
In 21st century Maine, people were beginning to realise the numbers didn’t add up. Prisoners in solitary were more likely to reoffend and more likely to commit violence when sent back to live among other prisoners.
Self-harm, suicide, drug abuse, all cost the taxpayers money, and cost even more when solitary confinement was deployed.
That, ultimately, is why US prisons have begun to scale it down. Not compassion, just cash.