The Hotel Inspector, Five

I stayed in a frightful hotel in Plymouth once. Decrepit rooms, filthy windows, potentially fatal cuisine, sinister staff… By contrast, that same city’s Astor Hotel looked quite pleasant, though not if you were viewing it through the gimlet eyes of Alex Polizzi. Nothing that met her gaze was adequate. The décor was too kitschy and flowery and old-fashioned. The carpets were disgusting, the walls stained and peeling, the lobby too gloomy to contemplate. The establishment’s habit of equipping wardrobes with tatty mismatched plastic hangers aroused her ire. The practice of leaving towels on the bed in little heaps made her positively tear her hair out (“every shit hotel has towels piled in the middle of the bed!” she stormed).

Yet you could imagine that there might be customers who rather warmed to the Astor’s atmosphere of amiable eccentricity, personified by its owner, Joseph Louei. Joseph, a venerable Iranian who had risen through the ranks of the leisure industry from dishwasher to hotel owner over 30 years, sported a vivid array of shoes, suits and hats that made him resemble by turns Al Capone, a Neapolitan singing waiter and a bookie’s runner. He’d be a natural for those “Go Compare!” insurance commercials.

He’d conceived all the colour schemes and - what’s that word – appurtenances for his hotel himself, and was touchingly proud of the results. You could see how much it hurt him when the brusque Ms Polizzi, scion of the mighty Forte hotels dynasty, vented her somewhat authoritarian spleen on his cherished creations. He seemed especially fond of the squashy leather armchairs in the reception area, and dug his heels in over some frothy curtains that Polizzi’s design consultant raised objections to.

Clearly there was something not quite right about the Astor (pictured right), not least that it had never made a profit in the nine years that Louei had been in charge of it, but for these programmes to function properly they need something truly catastrophic to get their teeth into. What you really want to see is (for instance) Mary Portas in full mad-eyed rampage, not just virtually bulldozing the premises and starting again from scratch but giving the owners a full-scale psychological makeover and attitude-transplant into the bargain. It’s as if everything gets sucked up in a howling whirlwind and then falls back to earth in a totally transformed state.

Not so here. Not that I’d suggest anyone should actually push the boat out and stay at the Astor, you understand, but you felt that Polizzi was scratching about a bit to find things to complain about. Forcing down a plateful of poached eggs and bacon, she delivered a set-piece to camera about how appalling the Astor’s breakfast was – there wasn’t enough stuff to choose from, like croissants or Danish pastries or Weetabix or whatever. But the restaurant manager, a chap called Chip, pointed out (not unreasonably, I thought) that all these items could be ordered from the menu. This wasn’t good enough for Alex, who riposted with a lecture about how Plymouth was now full of Holiday Inns and Jurys Hotels where (she implied) the breakfasts resembled the kind of epic spreads you’d expect to greet you every morning were you to find yourself a guest on Roman Abramovich’s yacht.

Ultimately Joseph bowed to the inevitable. He’d presumably signed a contract to do just that, anyway. The lobby ended up all bright, fresh, stylishly themed and leather-chair-free, while the rooms were transformed into mini-marvels of restrained yet modern design picked out in judiciously-chosen colours. Alex had devised the Portas-like gambit of staging an “Independents Day” gathering of local independent hotels and businesses to celebrate the Astor’s rejuvenation, but the guests all seemed slightly reticent with their praise. And in the end it seemed as though the wily old recidivist Louei hadn’t quite abandoned his old bad habits after all, and was still hoarding cheap plastic coat hangers in his wardrobes. Good for him, I thought.

• The Hotel Inspector on Five's website
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