Golden oldies | 25 February 2012

A young Indian entrepreneur, Sonny (Dev Patel), has a brilliant idea: to open a hotel that caters for the ‘elderly and beautiful’ British tourist. He plans, in other words, to exploit that pot at the end of the service industry rainbow, the ‘grey pound’. Sonny fakes some photographs depicting what he hopes his hotel will look like (one day in the future when the building works are done) and prints a brochure that hoodwinks seven gullible pensioners, each in a state of mental and/or physical disrepair, into booking their one-way ticket to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

They arrive — following a journey in which they discover that India is both hot and crowded — to find the hotel of their dreams meeting the health and safety standards of their nightmares. However, since this is not the latest confidence trick to make the front pages of the Daily Mail but the beginning of a romantic comedy, it’s not long before the redoubtable seven begin to fall for the charms of India and the funny little ways of their hosts.