BBC2’s Hotel India: slums? What slums?

Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. The tone of Wednesday’s episode was set immediately when the narrator introduced us to ‘one of the oldest and grandest hotels in the world’, where ‘no detail is too small or demand too great’, and there’s ‘an army of staff dedicated to flawless service’.

To prove it, head of housekeeping Indrani then strode fearsomely down a corridor like a more elegant version of Hattie Jacques’s matron in the Carry On films. After using a torch (in daylight) to make sure the sheets just back from the laundry were indeed stain-free, she crawled under a basin to check the cleaners hadn’t skimped on any of the pipes. Next came a morning inspection of her male staff, where she was more like an old-school sergeant-major, complete with a fixation on hair length and the shininess of footwear.