A matter of taste

Enda Kenny being stingy with the crabs on The Restaurant; bizarre behaviour both upstairs and downstairs in Hotel Babylon and surreal Japanese anime on The South Bank Show are all on the menu for
Dermot Bolger this week

I have to confess to having taken a dim and slightly biased view in advance of Hotel Babylon (BBC 1, 9pm Thursdays) from the purely mercenary point of view. A couple of years ago, I devised and edited a collaborative novel called Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel, and was at the advanced stage of agreeing a dream option deal with BBC television, who wanted to buy the intellectual rights to the concept of the book for a television series set in a hotel.

It was a surreal dream deal in that they didn't seem to like any of the characters or the stories or indeed the location (which they were going to move to London). Indeed they seemed to dislike everything about the book except the general idea of it, for which they were willing to pay us all handsomely. However, just when we were about to put down deposits on villas in Portugal or dog kennels in Kinnegad, all interest from the BBC vanished, as is frequently the case in a writer's life, and nothing was ever heard again until a few weeks ago when I saw a trailer for Hotel Babylon and realised that they had found a far better and more suitable book to adapt.

Professional curiosity had to eventually get the better of jealousy, and having caught up with the series I must confess that it has been developed into a compulsive and multi-layered glimpse into the bizarre worlds within worlds that constitutes the daily life of any top hotel. From the immaculately-clad and perfectly mannered front of house staff greeting guests to the hidden army of illegal cleaners, maids and dish-washers all ready to hide at the given signal which signifies the start of yet another police raid, this series is slick, fast-paced and quietly gripping.

Hotels have always fascinated me for the duality of the myriad lives co-existing within them, and for what both guests and staff choose to hide and to reveal when entering the short-time sanctuary that the ritual of the hotel offers. While perhaps being at times slightly too glossy, Hotel Babylon nonetheless shows signs of becoming compulsive viewing.

For all kinds of other reasons The Restaurant (RTÉ 1, Thursday, 8.30pm) was always going to be compulsive viewing since it became clear that Enda Kenny was to be the celebrity chef this week.

Rather like Hotel Babylon, The Restaurant dips in and out of two worlds: the genteel calm of the dining room where diners (and occasionally critics) mouth ill-informed platitudes; and the frenzied heat of the kitchen where staff proffer stoic advice to the weekly victim.

In the previous week's episode, a garden designer got five stars from the assembled critics, but this reviewer had fears for Enda from the moment he donned the chef's hat and, like a good constituency worker, began to choose items for the Mayo connections that were either obvious – Clew Bay Oysters – or decidedly tenuous – Argentinean wines, because the founder of their navy was a Mayo man.

On the positive side, Enda looked far more likeable, relaxed and human in the chef's hat than he does in a suit in the Dáil, where his decidedly laboured and earnest delivery masks a genuine intelligence. I have long felt that Fine Gael's best electoral strategy would be to tie their leader's hands behind his back before letting him speak.

In the kitchen, Enda showed flashes of stoic humour as his best intentions met with considerable apathy from the assembled critics. As is always the case with Fine Gael, he was even getting blamed for things that didn't exist, like lemongrass in his main course and condensed milk in his dessert. Fine Gael always brought a sensible virtue of fiscal caution to government, but it seemed slightly out of keeping with the times that his Clew Bay Oysters turned out to exist in the singular as Clew Bay Oyster. He deserved better than two stars, but in this life you rarely get what you deserve. However, until Bertie Ahern turns up in an apron on television, Mr Kenny's crab rolls with coconut and ginger sauce get my vote every time.

Anyone who enjoyed the Booker Prize-winning novelist Peter Carey's recent book Wrong About Japan, will have been fascinated by The South Bank Show (UTV, Sunday, 10.30pm) on Japanese manga and anime comics. It was a brilliant insight into the surreal but deadly serious world of these unique Japanese graphic novels and films, a parallel universe which millions of Japanese people escape into. A curious hybrid of ancient Japanese tradition and the American comics which flooded in after the Second World War, there is nothing quite like it in the West and visually, we are worse off for that.