Low life: Staying in Channel 4’s hotel

In the last Channel 4 series of The Hotel, we saw Mark Jenkins, ex-owner of the Grosvenor hotel in Torquay, campaigning to attract more ‘posh people’ to his failing Victorian hotel. He was apprehensive, though, that he might not know how to handle any posh people that were seduced by this and did come. Posh people, he opined, ‘can be a nightmare because they want things done properly. The good thing about poor people is that they are just happy to be on holiday. Mind you,’ he added, ‘some poor people can be quite demanding, so you can’t win.’ It was possibly owing to statements such as this that Mr Jenkins was dubbed the ‘real life Basil Fawlty’. Mr Jenkins also smoked and was not ashamed of it.

One watches television news these days not to know what’s happening in the world, but to goggle in disbelief at both the subtlety and the insulting lack of subtlety of the leftist propaganda being pushed out. Similarly, realising that Mr Jenkins was a kind of holy innocent who was liable to say anything, I watched The Hotel partly to gauge current restrictions on freedom of speech. These must now be virtually absolute, because ‘poor people’ was about as controversial as it got.

But The Hotel was nevertheless entertaining. As a fan of the show, I stayed at the Grosvenor last week. The hotel is a lovely old Victorian seaside hotel gone to seed. It wants some filler and a lick of paint or two. The old sash window in my room rattled in the wind and let through gusts of cold air. But folded in two and wedged in the gap my receipt stopped the rattle, and the curtains, if pulled together with a bias to the right, excluded most of the draught.