BBC2’s Hotel India: slums? What slums?

Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. The tone of Wednesday’s episode was set immediately when the narrator introduced us to ‘one of the oldest and grandest hotels in the world’, where ‘no detail is too small or demand too great’, and there’s ‘an army of staff dedicated to flawless service’.

To prove it, head of housekeeping Indrani then strode fearsomely down a corridor like a more elegant version of Hattie Jacques’s matron in the Carry On films. After using a torch (in daylight) to make sure the sheets just back from the laundry were indeed stain-free, she crawled under a basin to check the cleaners hadn’t skimped on any of the pipes. Next came a morning inspection of her male staff, where she was more like an old-school sergeant-major, complete with a fixation on hair length and the shininess of footwear.

Indrani was also one of the many people we met who proudly declared that in India ‘the guest is God’. In which case, God must be pretty picky, because much of the programme concerned the almost psychotically meticulous preparations for the forthcoming arrival of an unnamed VIP at the £9,000-a-night Tata Suite. Before he arrived, the suite was inspected not just by Indrani and general manager Gaurav but by all the heads of department, some of whom even managed to find something still wrong with it. (‘No, no, no,’ lamented the woman in charge of the Taj’s food and drink. ‘No Bacardi, absolutely not. Please upgrade.’)

For some programmes, the presence of such luxury in a city where, as the narrator regretfully noted, millions live in slums — and plenty can’t even afford to do that — might have led to a fair amount of agonising.