Travel the world, see new places - must be a complete nightmare

TV REVIEW: EVERYONE’S a critic

TV REVIEW:EVERYONE'S a critic. It's true most of the time, but on TripAdvisor it's true all the time – and that's the point of the phenomenally successful website. People post their opinions on places they've stayed and restaurants they've eaten in; the influential travel site gets 40 million visits a month. The posters are anonymous, which gives a licence to all manner of nutters and cranks to be as abusive and unpleasant as they like.

In the hugely entertaining Attack of the Trip Advisors(Channel 4, Monday) we met some of the site's most avid posters, including the mature student who visits places with rubbish reviews so he can stick the knife in even further and the smug couple who have a long and picky checklist to go through at every place they stay (water left in the kettle in the room – the horror) and, weirdest of all, Ricky. The 26-year-old serial poster has several tests for hoteliers, starting with putting a pen mark on the sheets so he can check if they've been changed. He has a skin condition – not that he told the hotel staff, and not that they asked. "Do you have a skin condition, sir?": can't really see that happening at check-in, but for Ricky it's another black mark against the management. You wouldn't fancy asking any of these people the time, never mind base your holiday plans on their opinions.

If the posters were a peculiar lot, the hoteliers and B&B owners in the programme weren’t much better. All of them believed that a bad write-up could seriously damage their business and had a sometimes visceral hatred of the posters. Boorish Colin, the owner of a ye-olde-type restaurant and B&B in Norfolk, fancied himself as a bit of a Basil Fawlty, doing the whole goose-step routine when Germans were staying, looming over diners in a grubby apron telling boring stories, and serving breakfasts that had been cooked the night before. And he was still apoplectic about negative postings.

This wasn’t a definitive or even balanced documentary – four out of five is the average rating on the site – but where would the fun have been in showing reasonable people giving positive opinions?

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IN TWO YEARS, Susan Boyle has gone from being unknown and unemployed and living alone in a council house to becoming the first solo artist ever to have two albums debut at number one on both sides of the Atlantic in a 12-month period and selling more than 14 million albums in 14 months – and she still lives alone in the same council house. She has bought herself a new, larger house – the posh house, as she calls it – in her bleak-looking village, but she uses it to store her growing memorabilia and awards collection.

For Susan Boyle: An Unlikely Superstar(UTV, Friday) the director Osca Humphreys followed the Scottish singer around for three months, crafting an intimate portrait that was satisfying to watch despite the underlying feeling that the documentarymaker wasn't getting what he wanted. Over and over Humphreys asked about Boyle's mental state, as if he couldn't quite imagine how the 48-year-old overnight sensation could not be filled with angst. She's happy, she answered. Yes, she's lonely, but no lonelier than she was before and there are times when she's not lonely at all. He referred to her angry outbursts many times, and quizzed her friend and her manager – a sort of father figure – about them, but none made it on to the screen, so why go on about them?

“Is the dream what you were expecting?” he asked. “The dream is not a nightmare,” she replied, as she sat in the back of a London cab on the way to a meeting with Simon Cowell about her next album. She’s no slouch when it comes to the quickfire responses. Cowell, in his smart London office, menthol cigarette in hand, defended his promotion of SuBo, agreeing that her instant fame did cause her problems but arguing, quite reasonably, that just because she has an intellectual disability doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be allowed to make the most of her talents. There was no sign of exploitation or of her being treated any differently from any other star in the music machine. Her mild intellectual disability resulted from oxygen deprivation at birth, but the extent of that disability is unclear. She was, she said “a bit slow” when she was younger and was bullied for it. Now she just seems uncomplicated, highly emotional and in need of support but well able for the life she’s living. And good for her.

"Fame and fortune have not made her story a fairytale," droned the film-maker, sticking to his misery vision when pretty much everything we saw on screen screamed the opposite. "I enjoyed that," Boyle said, looking every inch the glamorous diva as she came off stage in Shanghai having sung during the final of China's Got Talentbefore a TV audience of half a billion.

OF THE STORIES in the poorly conceived The Commute(RTÉ1, Monday), only that of Margaret Sexton Fitzpatrick lived up to the billing of "extreme commuting". The mother of seven travels from her home in Clonakilty, Co Cork, to her nursing job in London every week, an arrangement that sounded mind-bogglingly exhausting and was clearly emotionally difficult for Sexton Fitzpatrick, who can't get a full-time nursing job closer to home.

As for the rest of the people featured, well, the education administrator who travels from Limerick to Dublin is home by eight o’clock every night, something many people who live and work in Dublin would envy. The documentary was well shot and edited, and it spent time with the people it featured, but most of them weren’t actually commuters: they were emigrants who visit home a lot. The Sligo builder who moved to London and returns every six weeks or so isn’t commuting; nor is the Westmeath man who has the best of both worlds, teaching in London and returning home at weekends to captain his local hurling team.

“It’s a new transient community,” said the voice-over, but I bet stories like these – Sexton Fitzpatrick’s excepted – could just as easily been found at the height of the boom. Good idea for a documentary, but it just didn’t deliver.


tvreview@irishtimes.com

Get stuck into

Life's Too Short(Thursday, BBC2) Fake documentary from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the creators of The Officeand Extras, starring Warwick Davies, with Liam Neeson guest starring in the opening episode. Funny, objectionable or possibly both.

Bernice Harrison

Bernice Harrison

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist and cohost of In the News podcast