A Very British Hotel Chain: Inside Best Western review – too mean by half

Many big questions are being asked about how the coronavirus pandemic will reshape our lives, society and culture. Will it make the NHS respected, untouchable and better funded? Will it force a reckoning between the haves and the have-nots? Will the resurgence of nature, caused by the retreat of humans, prompt us to re-evaluate our responses to the climate breakdown?

But such questions are for the serious pages of the newspaper. Here, we can only ask: post-corona, whither television? Obviously, the practical ramifications are already being felt. Filming has been shut down or postponed everywhere, holes in the schedules are getting larger and deeper and those in the business of acting, directing or producing are trying to find ways to build dramas and documentaries via Zoom. But perhaps it is more interesting to think about intangibles – how tastes might change under this kind of pressure, what appetites might disappear, what new ones might be born in the aftermath.

If I were a betting woman, I would place a modest wager on the likes of A Very British Hotel Chain: Inside Best Western (Channel 4) falling out of fashion. It is subtly different from the handful of predecessors that spring to mind. A Very British Hotel went behind the scenes of the opulent Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park in London, while Inside Claridge’s took its subjects at their own estimation and marvelled at the efforts that went into managing the very, very rich and famous. Elsewhere, the 1997 BBC fly-on-the-wall series Hotel made the Adelphi in Liverpool famous (and hopefully richer), by showing us its microcosm in full, warm detail, with Andrew Sachs narrating with a light but straight touch.

A Very British Hotel Chain, by comparison, feels mean-spirited. Perhaps under normal circumstances it would have gone unnoticed, but there is a sneering undertone, a muted bagpipe drone, throughout.

It is hard to provide solid evidence of a tone, but it has something to do with Jerusalem being played over the top of our first sighting of a Best Western hotel (in Fowey, Cornwall) and the repeated mentions of the brand’s hotels being distributed largely along motorway routes (“You’re never more than three junctions away from a Best Western”) as if that is funny or risible. It has something to do with the choice of Diane Morgan (of Philomena Cunk fame) for the almost sardonic voiceover that invites us to observe the people from a distance (“This is Terii, with two Is”) rather than warm to them. And it has something to do with the lingering shots of a bubblegum-pink money box (for tips) in the shape of a bus on a reception counter while deputy general manager Jane explains that, because the US-based company’s hotels are individually owned and run, “they have soul”.

There is nothing wrong with showcasing genuine moments of bathos, of course. The opening episode alone yielded plenty of those – enough to hold your interest without exposing simple moments of dullness and playing for laughs. Hotel inspector Alasdair’s flourishing of his tape measure with the explanation: “I pinched this out of my mother’s sewing box. She’s been dead for over 20 years,” does not need anything more. He is also a source of genuine, deliberate humour (for example, his comment when nobody comes running when he tests the emergency cord in a bathroom – “I can just lie here and bleed, I don’t mind”), which throws the other bad faith “laughs” sharply into relief.

There is also – although this is not the makers’ fault – the question of how many of the people we are watching are now furloughed (at best) or wondering if and when they will have a hospitality industry to go back to.

Perhaps it is impossible to make a documentary about anyone or any kind of setting that reminds us of The Office, which held unglamorous lives up to such pitiless scrutiny, or to aim (as A Very British Hotel Chain might have been trying) for an Alan Bennett/Victoria Wood warmth when dealing with nonfictional characters.

Or perhaps I am just being hugely oversensitive and ridiculous. But in a world in which the margins of fairness and kindness are being so tightly squeezed, A Very British Hotel Chain felt like a dismal hour in a time already full of them.