Scottish Daily Mail

Welcome to Monaco, where you NEVER say who you work for . . .

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

Prince Albert of Monaco is a clutterbug. if he were living on benefits in Hull, you might see him on some programme with a title like the nightmare Hoarder next-Door, with piles of rotting clothes and magazines blocking every window.

but as he is the son of Grace Kelly and ruler of a ludicrousl­y wealthy principali­ty on the riviera, no one dares tell him to give his office in the palace a tidy — certainly not the obsequious film-maker behind the camera of Inside Monaco: Playground Of The Rich (bbc2).

Albert’s desk is heaped with towers of books and folders of papers. the sideboard is buried under photograph­s, their frames stacked like lPs in a record shop.

every spare inch of wall space is hidden by framed medals and certificat­es. Most precarious of all are the tables crammed with ornaments: glass globes, porcelain statuettes, china birds, bottles, marble balls, lacquered boxes and all manner of tat.

You can’t really blame him. His whole domain looks like that: barely bigger than Hyde Park, Monaco is stuffed with so many buildings that one visitor described it as ‘luxury legoland’. Space is at such a premium that extendable helipads have been constructe­d over the water, to give pilots extra room for landings.

Albert granted director Michael Waldman permission to film behind the scenes in the palace and to attend a party or two. this threepart documentar­y is simply happy to slip past the silken entrance rope and squeeze inside.

in return for access, there are no difficult questions or sharp observatio­ns. A couple of brief, fawning interviews with the Prince allow him to get away with saying practicall­y nothing. inside Monaco amounts to a promotiona­l video: you can imagine it on a loop in the hotel foyers, an endless cavalcade of air kisses and supercars.

Waldman was curious to know only what everything cost.

From off-camera, we kept hearing a voice ask: ‘Any idea how much this would be?’ like a nosy customer wasting the sales staff’s time in a jewellery shop.

thus we learned that a harbour berth for a megayacht is two grand a night, that the biggest bottle of champagne at a reception cost £28,000 and the white truffle in the kitchen is worth £35,000 — the same price as a night in the Princess Grace suite at the Hotel de Paris — and that every Monaco resident must keep half a million in a current account at all times.

Also, the monthly rental of a one-room apartment is . . . oh, really, who cares? the interviewe­e who reluctantl­y told us most was a yacht worker called tommy who refused to reveal the name of his employer: ‘i don’t want to have a horse’s head in my bed tomorrow morning, know what i mean?’ Yes, we get the picture.

One of the parties was an awards ceremony for social media’s influencer of the Year — the kind of event where you might find Arabella, played by Michaela coel in her drama serial I May Destroy You (bbc1).

Arabella is a writer, feted for a novel created on twitter, who goes out clubbing in london with friends and regains consciousn­ess with her phone smashed and her face bleeding. Slowly, she begins to fear she was drugged and sexually assaulted. the story is told in half-hour bites, and the first wasn’t enough to gauge yet how engaging it will be.

but coel is a powerful actress, and i May Destroy You is based on traumatic personal experience. Give it a couple of weeks: this could be the new Fleabag.

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