As jammy celebrity gigs go, Giles Coren and Monica Galetti must be wondering how on earth they landed the most plum of all.
In Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby, which returned to BBC2 on Tuesday, they have to visit the most jaw-droppingly, nauseatingly ostentatious hotels in the world.
Yes, please put your hands together and pray for them.
The premise is that they “roll their sleeves up” with the staff, but honestly, this is not work. This is getting the chance to stay somewhere extortionate while mega hotels show off to the BBC for trade. Everyone’s a winner.
Giles and Monica were greeted with flutes of pink champers at the immense MGM Cotai in the Chinese city of Macau, a £2.7billion hotel that’s bigger than a New York City block and designed to look like a stack of jewellery boxes.
Then they were shown to their skyloft suites, which had an actual upstairs. God, the annoyance of having a butler constantly checking up on you. Tough times.
“All this to myself?” said Monica, whose career seems to have jumped out of the frying pan of a hot kitchen and into, well, the lap of luxury.
And Giles was like a kid in a sweet shop playing with the all-powerful martphone controls.
There was a carbon fibre hammock bath and techy toilet that greets you. Perfect if you like your lavs to have good manners.
There was talk of joining the 6,000 staff on their shifts, but not before enjoying a six-course meal and visit to the football pitch-sized “town square”, featuring a Lamborghini dealership, living art garden with 100,000 plants, designer shops and mega display of LED screens.
Oh and of course a casino, since Macau is the Las Vegas of Asia. And a trip to thehotel kitchen revealed even more insane extravagance.
Working on up to 5,000 covers a day across eight restaurants, it takes a daily delivery of 10,000kg of food and has a store room that looks the size of an Amazon warehouse.
There was also a crazy technological theatre and a secret, unbookable mansion with 27 luxury private apartments for VIPs. “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.”
Kudos to Monica for going full MI5 on this one – a snoop at this level of excess makes for great telly.
I did actually spot moments of elbow grease from our weary travellers. Giles arranged flowers. Monica cleaned some windows. There was some anxiety over a very long noodle.
But I’m sure a soak in that hammock bath washed away the stresses of the day.
Jealous? Me? Maybe just a smidge.
