Like a brattish 11-year-old, Giles Coren needs his ears boxing
We’ve all suffered it — the expensive holiday wrecked by one ghastly fellow guest. Giles Coren was at the futuristic Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore, in Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby (BBC2), and he was determined to ruin it for everybody.
Messing up the displays of bottled water, riding on the housekeeping trolleys and giving cheek to the staff, Giles was like a cocky 11-year-old who has been indulged all his life. He wasn’t a presenter, just a spoilt brat let loose in a luxury resort.
The Marina Bay is three skyscrapers gazing across the Singapore Strait to Sumatra, topped with a roof garden that balances on the triple towers like a space-age Stonehenge. In the garden is an infinity pool the size of three football pitches, with water brimming over its sides.
The whole construction cost more than £1 billion and still looks like it’s one earth tremor away from becoming the world’s wettest heap of rubble.
But guests flock there, mostly to take selfies at the edge of the swimming pool in the sky.
Giles wanted us to know he wasn’t impressed. He’s the kind of egotist who introduces himself by listing his job titles — ‘I’m a restaurant writer, newspaper columnist and critic’ — and better hotels than the Marina Bay have met with his glib disapproval.
What he has never done, of course, is slogged for minimum wage in places like this. His co-presenter Monica Galetti, a professional chef, does know what it means to work double shifts in hot, cramped kitchens, and she was respectful and keen to learn as she interviewed the chefs.
But Giles couldn’t grasp that the lives of innumerable hotel staff rely on these jobs. He mocked, mucked around and showed off constantly.
Delivering breakfasts, the room service waiters didn’t even trust him to push the trolleys.
Underground in the car park, he badgered George the chief parking valet to let him drive one of the guests’ supercars — and accelerated towards a wall, pretending to crash it.
George tried to smile for the cameras, but when Giles decided to slide down the Ferrari’s bonnet, he lost his temper and started shouting. Not before time — what that man needs is his ears boxing. About 40 years ago.
From the glamour of five-star pampering to the squalor of Covent Garden’s gutters, and the seediest period drama for years: Harlots (ITv encore) is hidden away on an obscure payper-view outlet for good reason.
Perhaps ITv bosses saw the cast, including Jessica Brown Findlay (Lady Sybil in Downton Abbey), and thought this would be a tasteful foray into 18th century London’s secret world.
But Harlots is a concept in execrable taste, badly executed. Samantha Morton plays a madam, seeking to sell her daughter (eloise Smyth) to the highest bidder, with Lesley Manville as the bitter old harridan determined to see the family in jail.
Brown Findlay looks as though she’s hating every moment of it. With such penny-dreadful characters and a turgid script that makes them say everything three times, no one can blame her for scowling.
The drama was inspired by a 250-year-old guidebook to the Georgian sex trade, Jack Harris’s List Of Covent Garden Ladies, which describes the particular talents of hundreds of women.
Whoever opened that book and thought, ‘There’s a costume drama in this,’ needs their brains testing.