Time for a reality check
FOR many of us at this, still chilly time of year, FIVE STAR HOTEL (E4) seemed like a bit of a treat. Like Death In Paradise and Amazing Hotels, the pleasure is not so much in the detail as in the big picture, the palm trees and the promise of heat.
It’s a luxury establishment on the Greek island of Ios that features in the channel’s new show, a real place, even if what goes on there is somewhat less than real.
Thinking on, it’s strange that we call the likes of Spencer Matthews, Joey Essex and Lydia Bright reality TV stars, since the shows that made them famous are around 99 per cent false.
This one is too, with an assortment of pantomime characters from Made In Chelsea, Geordie Shore and TOWIE running a posh hotel in the Mediterranean.
It reminds me of a hotel I stayed in once, in a far-off land. One evening, crouching under a table as a drunken guest fired shots from his automatic pistol, I felt a tap on my arm. I looked down to see the waitress who had taken my dinner order. “Excuse me,” she said. “We have no more beef. Would you like pork?” I couldn’t believe anyone was still trying to run a restaurant while this was going on.
In a similar vein I couldn’t believe anyone wanted me to believe slow Joey stuck-up Spencer & Co were doing this hotel lark for real. They had a sort of boss figure, who occasionally groaned and grimaced at them in the manner of Blakey from On The Buses.
In addition to which, various guests (tangerine-tanned and simple, they looked like people who failed the auditions for other reality shows) gave them scores and feedback, partly based on how well they served breakfast, partly on how much fun they were in the bar.
I suppose, if they weren’t pretending there was a mission, something to be tried and hilariously failed at, it would just be A Bunch of Reality Stars And An Ex-Footballer Party In A Hotel With Some Other People. It is that but maybe they worried that people wouldn’t watch if it was so honest. They needn’t have worried. People will, quite plainly, watch anything.
It’s not always a good idea to be up front about your intentions. Tales Of The Unexpected rather invited its viewers to expect something, and because of that, the ending was usually a foregone conclusion.
ELECTRIC DREAMS: SAFE AND SOUND (Ch4), whose self-contained playlets are based on the short stories of Philip K. Dick, equally relies too heavily on twists that look more like right angles.
Last night’s story, of a cyberdictatorship panicking its citizens into conformity and consumption, had many a fine moment. Based on a story penned in 1955, it was both classic and up to date, with hippy-chick Foster (Annalise Basso) as the fish out of water in a futuristic urban high school. With terror scares, online radicalisation and technology turning teens into amoral consumer slaves, it could have been dreamt up yesterday.
We watched the lonely Foster falling in love with the helpdesk voice in her ear and as the relationship deepened, wondered, for a moment, if the voice really was just in her head.
We knew it all had to end soon, though and that’s always the problem with short stories. When they’re good, you want them to carry on. They can’t though, they have to finish quickly, and the end is usually the one you saw coming a mile off.