Hotel Babylon (BBC1)
Tony Blair Rock Star (C4)
Eleventh Hour (ITV1)
HOTEL Babylon is Crossroads with a bigger budget and scenery that doesn't wobble. Check in at this plush London hotel and you get the chance to live out "your wildest, darkest, craziest fantasies". At £3,500 a night for a suite, this luxurious living doesn't come cheap and this series, based on Imogen Edward-Jones's bestseller, hardly pauses for breath as the camera rushes along corridors and into bedrooms to spy on what's going on.
"Did you find the finger?," asks manager Rebecca (Tamzin Outhwaite) after an accident in the kitchen. The concierge arranges a female escort for a guest (she arrives in a box and requires a foot pump) and I'm sure I saw a sheikh sacrificing a goat in his bedroom.
Rebecca sees the arrival of an American rock band as a money-spinner. Imagine her disappointment when all they order is three peppermint teas and a ginger cake. What about, she inquires, the fights, fires, sofas through windows and dead hookers in the bathroom? "They have a responsibility to spend an obscene amount of money here," she says.
Hotel Babylon delights in revealing the tricks of the trade, from topping up the bottled water in the cocktail cabinet from the tap or letting a mouse loose in a room in order to force the occupants to leave to make way for a more free-spending guest.
Hotel Babylon the series is impossibly glossy, unbelievably glamorous and quite a long way removed from reality (apart, I'm sure, from the bit about the bottled water) but looks set to keep us entertained over the next couple of months. I'll be booking a room again.
Tony Blair Rock Star found another would-be rocker failing to behave badly. Friends, teachers and reconstructions using a Blair lookalike told of the Prime Minister's attempt to become a rock star in the year between leaving his exclusive public school and going to university.
According to friends, as an 18-year-old in 1971 he didn't have a political thought in his head and "couldn't run a gig, let alone a country". Opponents might say nothing has changed.
At school, with his long hair and big grin, he was considered cool, although one teacher saw him more as "an ageing Artful Dodger". He wasn't made a prefect as his house master thought his leadership would take people in the wrong direction. Again, some would say no change there.
Armed with a guitar called Clarence, this would-be Mick Jagger moved to London to pursue his rock dream and eventually became lead singer of Ugly Rumours. The band played only six gigs. He joined the Labour Party instead.
Whether the Government has someone like Professor Ian Hood on its payroll, I don't know. He's the fictional scientist investigator played by Patrick Stewart in Eleventh Hour. Finding the foetuses of 27 deformed babies put him on the trail of a pregnant woman carrying the latest in a cloning experiment. "If she goes into labour, God help her," he said, meaning giving birth, not joining Blair's party.
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