The Real Marigold Hotel
Paddington: A Year On The Tracks
Rating: 
Quick, I’ve got a great idea. Take ten elderly celebs, give them cameras and send them off to live somewhere charming but cheap — Eastbourne, or maybe Ilfracombe — for the rest of lockdown.
We’ll call the show Social Bubble. They can have video calls with their loved ones, and go out to the shops as long as they maintain that vital two parking meters apart.
There will be little jobs to do, such as making facemasks or cooking something palatable from the random ingredients delivered by Tesco (eight bananas and an aubergine . . . again), but really the series is all about the friendships that spring up between this bunch of strangers.
Ex-Bond girl Britt Ekland just wants a husband, and any husband will do. She has latched on to the richest available, naturally — former Dragon Duncan Bannatyne, whose hair is such a uniform bronze that I suspect it was coloured at a car panel respray workshop
The concept is bound to work, because essentially it’s the same format as The Real Marigold Hotel (BBC1).
The pretence of this show is that the celebs are investigating India as a possible place to spend their retirement, so they sample the street food, pet sacred cows and visit temples.
But actually India is a distraction. The pleasure of the series is in getting to know the retirees. And this is a marvellously disparate bunch, ranging from the convivial Henry ‘Blowers’ Blofeld, he of the unmistakable cricket commentaries, to the introverted Susie Blake, a former Coronation Street actress who may have missed her true calling as a hermit.
Strictly speaking, Duncan (pictured alongside John Altman, Paul Harman Elliott and Henry Blofeld) is already someone else’s husband, as he keeps trying to explain, but Britt is having none of it
Only in showbiz could such an unlikely collection of pals be thrown together. Their needs are so wildly different.
Chuckle Brother Paul Elliott would give anything for a steak-and-kidney pie, but he stoically keeps eating the bhajis, like a man who has been roped into a meal at the Mumbai Palace on Rotherham High Street and is determined to get his money’s worth.
Ex-Bond girl Britt Ekland just wants a husband, and any husband will do. She has latched on to the richest available, naturally — former Dragon Duncan Bannatyne, whose hair is such a uniform bronze that I suspect it was coloured at a car panel respray workshop.
Strictly speaking, Duncan is already someone else’s husband, as he keeps trying to explain, but Britt is having none of it.
She latches on to his arm, calls him her Temporary Man and amuses herself by chipping away at his colossal self-confidence.
When the 70-year-old businessman commented that he’d like to spend another two decades travelling the world, Britt looked stunned. Surely he didn’t expect to live that long, she said.
‘I do love Duncan,’ she confided to the cameras. ‘I like a vain man.’
Chuckle Brother Paul Elliott would give anything for a steak-and-kidney pie, but he stoically keeps eating the bhajis, like a man who has been roped into a meal at the Mumbai Palace on Rotherham High Street and is determined to get his money’s worth
So far we haven’t seen all that much of EastEnders actor John ‘Nasty Nick’ Altman, who seems grumpy, or the shy singer Barbara Dickson. Watching how the group coaxes them out of their shells will be fascinating.
We left the celebs cramming in to a sleeper carriage on a sweltering afternoon.
That’s where my idea for a low-budget British version falls down, because a train in the UK would be going nowhere.
Paddington: A Year On The Tracks (C5) made it clear that our railways just don’t work on hot days. Whenever the temperature rises above 30°c, the iron tracks are liable to expand and buckle.
Nothing anyone can do about it, guv. It’s the weather, innit?
The same goes for rain. One heavy shower and the whole of the West Country is cut off, while a bloke in wellies and a high-viz jumpsuit stands on the embankment and tuts.
Meanwhile, it’s a four-hour delay at Reading and standing room only. How the Indians keep their railways running on time with a billion passengers and an annual monsoon is a mystery.
Paddington: A Year On The Tracks (C5) made it clear that our railways just don’t work on hot days. Whenever the temperature rises above 30°c, the iron tracks are liable to expand and buckle