Hotel heaven or home hell?

TV REVIEW: Prime Time InvestigatesRTÉ1, Monday. The SavoyUTV, Monday. The ApprenticeTV3, Monday. Pakistan's Flood DoctorBBC2, Monday

THIS WEEK, in a powerful piece of public-service broadcasting, we found out how much of a misnomer “care worker” can be. Not much work and very little care were in evidence in the findings of

Prime Time’s

investigation into the provision of home care to the elderly by private companies – paid for by the taxpayer. The RTÉ reporter Adrian Lydon led the four-month undercover investigation in the must-see programme of the week.

The care workers shown in the film who were tasked with supporting the elderly or infirm in their own homes on a pay-by-the-hour basis weren’t evil or bad: they were just untrained and unsuited to the job. Not that their employers seemed too bothered. Some didn’t even give face-to-face interviews; others encouraged their new recruits to lie about their experience and qualifications.

And the workers themselves, mostly immigrants, were often exploited – though, in the hierarchy of exploitation, paying less than the minimum wage pales in comparison with force-feeding a frightened elderly woman her dinner. Anyone who saw the programme won’t easily scrub the image of that frail woman in her own kitchen pleading, cogently and clearly, with her care worker to stop trying to jam food into her mouth.

Lydon approached one service provider and asked: “Why is Clontarf Home Care Services putting untrained people into homes looking after the most vulnerable people?” – but by then we knew. Kerching! What a money-making business this is, with the taxpayer picking up the enormous tab and Mary Harney’s freakish monster the HSE lashing out the lolly without checking exactly how it is spent. Bad health policy, badly implemented.

The Minister for Health wasn’t on the programme – though there was a brief appearance by Minister for Older People Áine Brady (what on earth does she do of a day except, with luck, take the odd moment to hang her head in shame?), who said that regulation isn’t the answer even though everything that had gone before screamed that it is.

The editorial content was so powerful it was easy to overlook how well made the programme was. Sometimes undercover camera work is as blurry and tedious to decipher as a security camera on Crimecall, but not here. The care workers planted by the programme got the story and strong, clear footage too. Now that’s a good day’s work.

STRANGEST PROGRAMME of the week was The Savoy,and it could have been the makeover show to trump all others as it followed the eye-wateringly expensive renovation of that grand old London institution. Instead it was like a promotional sales video.

The hotel closed for an 18-month renovation in December 2007, letting its 600 staff go. It reopened and began hiring again last October, months behind schedule and wildly over budget. There was a half-hearted attempt to focus on some of the key players to give the programme a bit of personality – the general manager, the chef and the cockney foreman – but for all the colourful language of the latter they were a fairly colourless bunch. It was saved a little by Sean Davoren, the Limerick-born head butler recruited to revive the hotel’s butler service, last offered to guests 30 years ago.

There are only so many figures a viewer can hack in what’s supposed to be a bit of light entertainment: £25,000 for a mattress, 52,000 pieces of Wedgwood – on and on it went until it sounded like the how-to-kit-out-the-hotel chapter in a service manager’s training book. But at least there was Davoren, who brings a certain theatrical flourish to the job. His first task was to employ and then train 26 underbutlers. “I have no intention of losing my reputation over any of ye,” he told his handsome bunch of proteges on day one, advising that “ye will be the wind beneath the guests’ wings”.

The hotel is managed for its Saudi-prince owner by a Canadian firm whose team-building for the new group of 650 employees included having them stand in circles chanting “I am Savoy” like dull-eyed cult members. You couldn’t help suspect that a company that corporate wouldn’t let a programme out on the airwaves without approving every last centimetre of footage. Dullness explained, then.

EVEN THOUGH Bill Cullen has no time for that corporate mumbo-jumbo, the final of The Apprenticewas a lacklustre affair. Even Bill, who has shown himself to be quite the grump – he makes his BBC Apprenticecounterpart, Alan Sugar, look like a ray of light and positivity – was muted. The last time I tuned in, Panos was proclaiming his fear of power tools – not a great admission, as the task was to stand around a giant DIY warehouse and sell power tools – and Michelle was bawling her eyes out over something or other. It didn't stop her making it to the final – Panos lasted until last week – and the model turned salesperson was up against recent business graduate Niamh.

It felt like being trapped between the sticky pages of the bumper catalogue of random products, and this week's show was even worse. The contestants each had to devise a marketing presentation for not one but three products and services, and those companies that ponied up the dosh for some TV3 telly time got quite a bang for their buck, with the marketing managers and MDs given extensive camera time to flog their wares. Good for them but tedious for viewers, and it made for another boring sales task. Surely The Apprenticehas to be about more than sales. Everything went boringly smoothly, and Michelle won because she had experience, as against Niamh, who hadn't.

The biggest problem was when Michelle’s team couldn’t get hold of a Polaroid camera, leading to the only memorable Bill-ism of a very drawn-out show. “Polaroid camera?” he snarled when they admitted to not being able to source one. “Sure they went out with the Indians.”

And just when you thought the product placement was finally over, along came Bill to say that “to reward your tenacity, in 2011 you’ll be driving a brand new . . .” (Go on, guess the brand.) Just for 2011, Bill? Not for keeps then, so not quite the big deal it seems. Cue a cringy tacked-on-after-the-credits bit where Jackie and Bill handed over the car keys to the women and the cameras lovingly followed the finalists as they sat in “their” vehicles. “You look great in it,” said Bill, ever the car salesman.

After the deluge Mobile phones provide the only light for a doctor treating flood victims

Natural disasters hit global headlines and then disappear from the news, but the effects live on. In Pakistan's Flood Doctor Jane Corbin followed a Karachi surgeon, Dr Shershah Syed, as he brought medicine and aid to outlying areas in Sindh province six weeks after the flood.

“This is a tragedy beyond my imagination,” he said, surveying wrecked homes, hordes of starving people on swollen riverbanks patiently awaiting aid, and the groups of grandmothers, mothers and children abandoned by their husbands and fathers, who brought the animals to higher ground because the animals have monetary value and must be saved.

Eight million people in Sindh were displaced by the flood. At a chaotic and dilapidated health clinic Dr Syed performed 27 operations in 12 hours; on his last one, just after midnight, the power failed, and he completed the surgery with the lights from his assistants’ mobile phones. “It is so shameful we have to do these lifesaving operations by torchlight,” he said. “This a country with the atomic bomb and F16s and submarines. This is the priority set by our government, and it makes me very angry.”

Pakistan spends more than $5 billion a year on its military and defence, but it can’t keep the electricity going in a rural health centre. Little wonder the international community has been reluctant to rush in to provide aid.

tvreview@irishtimes.com