Never mind sweary Gordon, Sean is the star of The Savoy
This series of The Savoy (ITV) follows the hotel’s reopening after lockdown. Gordon Ramsay, already running the Savoy Grill, was launching a new venue, The River Restaurant. He doesn’t do any cooking in it (despite wearing chef ’s whites on opening night) but he’s the owner. “This may be one of the most exclusive addresses but it’s also one of the most expensive f---ing rents. So, yes, I want it f---ing right,” he said, with customary charm.
In the run-up to the VIP opening, Ramsay sat down to a tester meal of lobster and was displeased to find that the very big plates didn’t leave room for much else on the very small table. This would seem to me to be the fault of whoever bought the plates and the tables, but Ramsay gave everyone both barrels anyway. “That is bulls---. This is a clusterf---. Clusterf----. I want to f---ing shoot myself. I feel like f---ing Kitchen Nightmares has come to the f---ing Savoy.”
Do viewers still lap up this stuff ? Broadcasters seem to think so. But it was a blessed relief to spend time with the hotel’s more gracious staff, including its beautifully turned out general manager, Franck Arnold, and its suave restaurant director, Thierry Tomasin. The star of the show, though, is Sean Davoren, “guest experience
manager”, who rushes around and acts as the hotel’s biggest cheerleader.
This episode illustrated the limits of applying a fly-on-the-wall format to a hotel such as this. We saw Sean and his underling, Michael, buzzing around the Royal Suite, which a family had booked – along with 60 other rooms – for a wedding party. This represented £250,000 worth of business, we were told. Yet these super-wealthy guests clearly didn’t wish to be involved in the TV show, so we never saw a glimpse of them. Instead, we had to make do with scenes of Sean and Michael tiptoeing around outside.
And the guests who were willing to be filmed were either ordinary folk celebrating anniversaries, in whom the producers had no interest, or a pair of OTT fashionistas who were clearly delighted to be on TV with their clothes-wearing chihuahua. Oh, and Christopher Biggins was down in the Savoy Grill, regaling Strictly’s Shirley Ballas with tales of eating kangaroo testicles on I’m a Celebrity. But the staff treated them all as VIPS, which is exactly what a five-star hotel should do.
The Netflix series God’s Favorite Idiot is a comedy about an unassuming IT support worker named Clark Thompson who is struck by a thunderbolt one night and learns that he has been chosen by God to save the world from Satan. “Oh, no. Really?” says a dismayed Clark, when a visiting archangel lays out the details.
The comedy derives from the fact that Clark (Ben Falcone) is an unlikely man for the job, chosen – as explained by God in a later episode – because he is “sweet and simple like pecan pie”. He lists one of his main hobbies as “having nice conversations”. Clark doesn’t seem to be an idiot, just a shy chap whose life consists of being respectful to his colleagues and looking after his cats.
But a character like Clark needs a counterweight, and that comes in the form of Melissa Mccarthy’s Amily Luck (there is a reason why she’s called Amily, and not Emily, but I won’t bore you with it). Mccarthy doesn’t star in the series so much as crush it. Occasionally, writers and directors have been able to tease some subtlety out of Mccarthy’s performances – she was pretty good in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the film with Richard E Grant – but the creator of God’s Favorite Idiot is Ben Falcone. And Ben Falcone is married to Melissa Mccarthy. So he has given her carte blanche to do her schtick of being loud, boorish and generally unbearable, in the mistaken belief that everything she says or does is hilarious.
Amily talks incessantly about taking recreational drugs, rides her scooter along the pavement and yells at people. She is aggressively unfunny. Despite this, Clark is in love with her and they begin a relationship – opposites attract, and all that. So the series is an apocalyptic workplace sitcom – there is a supporting cast of colleagues – with a little romance thrown in.
If only Mccarthy dialled it down and we could concentrate on Clark, this would be a fun, lighthearted watch. Some of the details are amusing: Clark’s powers manifest themselves not just in the way he suddenly lights up like a glow-worm, but the fact that the Harry Styles song Sign of the Times strikes up at regular intervals. Then again, for every witty move there is a terrible attempt at getting laughs, such as a running joke about Clark’s bowel movements. I suspect this will be no one’s favourite show.
The Savoy ★★★
God’s Favorite Idiot ★★