Michele Hewitson: Boring bits needed

The new drama Hotel Babylon is based on a book by Imogen Edwards-Jones which is "a searing expose of life behind the scenes of the luxury hotel industry in London".

So it should be pretty good. I like this sort of stuff. "This is your perfect show," said the bloke. It sounds like Airline. It's a world within a world sort of stuff and I am a sucker for such things. Trouble is, the reason I like Airline so much is that it's really, really boring.

On Airline, nobody goes anywhere exciting. They stay in airports and paste on wobbly smiles when faced with abusive, stupid passengers who have arrived too late to get on their planes, or have left their passports at home, or have got too drunk to be allowed to fly. Often, not even the people with the tickets go anywhere.

Hotel Babylon, says the blurb, "takes us on a journey beyond the glamour and fade of the smiling faces and glittering chandeliers and into the frenetic, non-stop world of the staff".

I don't much like being told I'm about to go a journey. Everything's a journey now, even watching television, which is about as much of a journey as going to the dairy.

So far I don't much like Hotel Babylon, either. Because it is supposed to be based on real life, it should be quite fun. Who wouldn't like to know just what hotel staff really think of their guests?

The trouble is, because it is set in a posh hotel, it is supposed to be exciting. And, oddly, without the boring bits, the concept becomes unbelievable. Well, it is a drama.

But would a hotel really stage a power cut so they can throw out an entire floor - including a ha, ha, a fat bride still in her meringue frock - so they can accept a booking from a rock band? The band is called the Junk Dogs and they have an obnoxious female manager who is, of course, American.

The odious hotel manager, played by Tamzin Outhwaite is excited about having the Junk Dogs in her hotel. This is because they're bound to spend lots of money and cause lots of mayhem which will generate publicity in the papers.

Except, of course, the Junk Dogs are reformed characters under the thumb of their bitch band manager. Their spending amounts to three peppermint teas and a ginger cake.

Where was the dead junkie in the bath tub, lamented the bitch hotel manager. What about the fights? The sofa through the window?

Even if it is true that a grand hotel would welcome such behaviour, it doesn't ring true. And it may be that a hotel staffer would be asked to feed chocolates to a beautiful blonde woman while she is blow-drying her hair - naked. But it just looked like a chance to have a naked, beautiful blonde woman.

It's all very arch and knowing and is supposed to be cool. It's a soap, but a soap needs the boring bits. And even in a parallel universe the characters have to be human. In Hotel Babylon they're all too arch and knowing and given to one-liners.

Prime is doing parallel universes twice a week with Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. I can't watch this stuff for long, but I quite like to pop in and make rude comments about the costumes which are even more ghastly than the ones Air New Zealand staff wear.

The thing I like about Star Trek is that at any given time in any parallel universe things will be done with laser beams. It's all very boring and somehow reassuring: outer space is less exciting than a posh hotel.

It's a lot like Airline. I rather like that Data character, the android who tries to be more human. Thank goodness he's never seen Hotel Babylon, whose characters make androids look positively well-adjusted.