IMAGINE you are a TV producer. Your TV programme, on Channel 5, involves a posh, experienced hotel expert trying to sort out some of the UK's more random vacation locations.
You've done Blackpool B&Bs, you've done run-down country hotels, you've done the stereotypical awful-hotel-but-the-owner-can't-see-it in Cornwall, Cumbria and County Durham. Where to send the excellent Alex Polizzi next?
And then the letter arrives. From a nudist hotel. In suburban Birmingham. Naked Brummies!
Well, if life serves you lemons, you should make lemonade.
Chuck in some meat and two veg and you have documentary-comedy gold. What can go wrong?
The answer, as far as entertaining telly goes, is very little. And so The Hotel Inspector (Thursdays, 9pm, Channel 5) returned to our screens with Forte family member Alex rocking up at The Clover Spa in Birmingham, working with nudist hotel owner Tim Higgs, who can't understand why his hotel isn't more popular.
The stark fact was this: People don't like chewing on nuts at the bar while others are walking around revealing theirs. And this was a point that Higgs, who prefers to serve his customers in the buff, doesn't seem to understand.
Truth be told, this was fodder from heaven for Channel 5. The voiceover guy never missed an opportunity to pull out the puns, revealing how guests loved the new garden Polizzi insisted on 'so they can roast their chestnuts' before asking, after the future of the hotel was questioned, whether Higgs would 'get to see his end.'
There are programmes where celebrity fixers get sent in to sort somewhere out and you end up feeling sorry for those being fixed.
Anyone who runs a cafe and calls for Gordon Ramsay should really know they are beyond help. Likewise when Mary Portas rolls into a charity shop, you wonder what went wrong.
Polizzi is more subtle than that. She coaxes her people along, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but never (or rarely) having to refer to her hotelier track record to get what she wants.
Whether her trip to Birmingham is enough to save a nudist retreat remains to be seen, but if it does fold, it'll be because they ignored their invited expert, which in turn begs the question: “Why invite her at all?” Proof, maybe, that there is such a thing as bad publicity.
On a more serious note, the BBC has been running its 'When I'm 65' series over the past few days, a series of documentaries looking at various aspects of life as a pensioner.
Some of the programmes have been inspiring, such as How To Live Beyond 100 (Monday, BBC1, 10.35pm), featuring British 100-year-olds who swim every day, who are still active in their communities and, perhaps slightly more worrying in one case, admit to liking to drive fast despite being in triple digits.
Others, such as When I Get Older (BBC 1, Wednesday and Thursday, 9pm) were more moving. Seeing John Simpson choke up at the thought of being a burden to his family was moving in itself – a man who has spent a career dodging bombs and evading dodgy regimes revealing his most personal fears about the one thing none of us can avoid … time passing.
Insightful, informative and, yes, entertaining – this is the sort of stuff which reminds you why you don't really mind paying the licence fee. Which is more than can be said for the ridiculous 'who had sex with Kat?' plot in EastEnders (feels like nightly, BBC 1) at the moment. Two extremes, one TV station.
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