Getting a good reception
DESPITE the name of the series being AMAZING HOTELS: LIFE BEYOND THE LOBBY (BBC2, 8pm), it’s the lobby of the MGM Cotai hotel in Macau, China, that provides the biggest bang for your buck in the first of this new travel series.
As hosts Monica Galetti and Giles Coren discover, the MGM Cotai’s reception area is so much more than the place you pick up your room key and leave a deposit for the mini-bar. It’s a hotel lobby on steroids, a four-storey atrium as big as a football pitch and flanked by wall gardens, restaurants, a Lamborghini dealership and the world’s largest permanent indoor LED screen installation.Atop it sits a wavy glass roof that is not only striking, but more importantly, say the architects, typhoon-proof.
Giles and Monica split up the jobs of admiring the hotel’s art, helping the flower-arrangers
– Giles is surprisingly deft – touring kitchens and visiting the exclusive wing where rooms can’t be booked: you can only stay if you’re invited.At times the show feels like a promotional film for the place, but after four months of lockdown, this voyeuristic snoop around a dazzling hotel is quite the antidote to being stuck at home.
Love him or loathe him, Rupert Murdoch has transformed the news landscape and been a kingmaker for 40 years.The new three-part series THE RISE OFTHE MURDOCH DYNASTY (BBC2,
9pm) looks at how the Australiaborn media baron managed it.
The first episode takes us back to the 1997 general election, when
Tony Blair got Murdoch to endorse his bid to be prime minister, even though questions were later asked about the price the Government had to pay.
At around the same time, Murdoch was deciding which heir should take over running his empire. If you’ve seen the fabulous HBO drama Succession, said to be based on the Murdochs, it probably looked just as messy and dramatic.
With contributions from Hugh Grant, Alastair Campbell, Alan Sugar and Piers Morgan, this show attempts to get to the heart of the family media dynasty.
From the corridors of power to the Yorkshire moors, OUR YORKSHIRE FARM (Channel 5,
9pm) whisks us to a windswept landscape where a modern-day family of Waltons lives. Back for a third series, shepherdess Amanda Owens briskly tends to her two flocks – her nine children with husband Clive and 1,000 sheep.
Tonight’s opener sees more gentle farm antics; Clive plucks grey hairs out of the Swaledale sheep he’ll be showing at the country fair, while daughter Violet prepares to show her first animal.
Hay bales are pitchforked, cakes baked and ponies ridden, and the children help out when Clive gets a hip replacement.
All quite wholesome and cheery.