Caught on Camera!

When Richard E. Grant announced on Twitter recently that he was off to Hong Kong and Tokyo to film a second series of Hotel Secrets it further highlighted the fascination that the television and film industry has with hotels. Whether it’s a fly on the wall documentary about Claridge’s or Alex Polizzi’s Hotel Inspector, it would seem that hotels provide endless opportunities to production companies.

And it isn’t hard to work out why, because hotels are exciting places which, like it or not reflect every aspect of human life. People are born in hotels – only last month baby George Eades was born in a bathroom at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Grafton in London. People die in hotels – Margaret Thatcher at the Ritz Hotel, being the most recent example. Let’s face it just about everything else that happens in life is likely to take place in a hotel, so it’s no surprise that the cameras keep rolling.

But does all this endless worship at the altar of hospitality do the industry a disservice? Those of you who might remember a BBC fly on the wall series in the late 1990’s on Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel may agree. Yet the hotel enjoyed healthy bookings on the back of it and there is no such thing as bad publicity is there?

Things have moved on since the 90’s and we are now in the midst of celebrity culture and let’s face it celebrities and hotels go together well, but we are not allowed to talk about them, oh no! Well not until they have checked out any how, which is why Richard E. Grant was tweeting a picture of the view from Lady Gaga’s £10k suite at the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong earlier this month for the new series of Hotel Secrets.

Similarly at the end of last year Red Carnation gave one of their hotels over to Channel 4 to film Hotel GB which was staffed by wait for it … celebrities! But the producers were also working with organisations such as Springboard to convey a message about recruitment in the industry.

So what conclusion can we draw from this? Television’s fascination with the industry looks set to continue and we will continue watching and being entertained and shocked in equal measure. The snapshot these programmes provide of day to day human life at one end of the scale and sheer unadulterated luxury at the other is never going to pall.