Royle class

I was in Zagreb last weekend. The city closes early on Saturday, so I ended up watching television in my hotel. Once you’ve flicked past German stock-market reports and volleyball from Belgrade, there’s not a lot of choice, except one or two English-language cable programmes you would never dream of watching at home. Take CNN’s Quest, featuring someone — from his accent, British — called Richard Quest, who fancies himself as a character and goes around barking at people. He also barks banalities at us. His topic was art. ‘Art. We all know it when we see it. But do we really understand it?’ His interviewees, including David Hockney and Brian Sewell, looked fazed by his barked questions, as if fearful that he was really Sacha Baron Cohen in another disguise, there to make them look stupid. ‘Fake or forgery?’ he barked. ‘Is it just a pigment of the imagination?’ He sought enlightenment from Rolf Harris, who having made plenty of lousy TV programmes himself, clearly felt at home. The two men sat opposite each other and sang ‘Two Little Boys’, leaving one question: why?

The programme was endlessly interrupted by the sponsor’s ad, ‘Qatar Airways —taking you on a journey’, surely the most redundant slogan since ‘Better fly Gulf Air — they know the way’, as if pilots with other airlines had to poke their heads out of the cockpit and shout, ‘Hey, pal, am I right for Dubai?’

I watched for an hour in fascinated horror. ‘Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?’ Quest bellowed. At least someone is asking the big questions, even if they haven’t a clue what they mean. The sense that this kind of hotel-telly, TV so bad you would never watch it if you had any choice, might be the future — glib, empty, personality-driven, bland enough to keep hold of bored businessmen long enough to stop them hitting the porn channel — was deeply depressing.