The Real Marigold Hotel
BBC1
Wednesday, 9pm
STANLEY Johnson, father of the former foreign secretary, is wandering the streets of Udaipur in India with The Krankies, looking for whisky …
It sounds like the start of a joke, or a scene from a flu dream, but it is instead a snippet from The Real Marigold Hotel, the BBC reality show in which folk of a similar age live together for a while in a hot clime.
Think Love Island with hip replacements.
Bravo to whoever had the idea of casting the Scots double act alongside the usual crew of retired actors and sports people.
Pure dead Glaswegian to their core, it is touch and go whether India will survive cultural contact with them.
Stanley and The Krankies managed to find an off-licence and filled their boots.
Expensive, said Janette (Wee Jimmy Krankie) when they emerged.
“Well you can’t get a bottle of wine for £8 in England now!” spluttered Stanley, or Stan, as Ian Tough (Mr Krankie) called him.
“You can when you go to Lidl or Aldi,” said Janette.
Stanley looked at her in puzzlement, perhaps wondering if she was referring to parts of the Loire he had yet to discover.
The programme’s ostensible aim was to find out if India’s weather and low cost of living made it a possible retirement spot, as in the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Everyone certainly adored the luxury hotel the Beeb had booked.
The trouble started when they left it.
“It’s a bit grubby, isn’t it?” said actor Stephanie Beacham.
Janette was in tears at the sight of a donkey carrying a load of bricks. She clung to her husband as scooters roared past.
“Janette went from crying to laughing to being terrified,” Ian told the others.
Now she knows what it feels like to watch your stage act, someone might have muttered, but no one was that mean.
This being the first week everyone was on their best behaviour.
Later, comic Syd Little and Ian took pity on jockey Bob Champion, who had never eaten a curry before, and decided to cook a roast chicken dinner.
This meant shopping for chickens.
Real, live ones.
The butcher duly plucked one from a cage and hacked its head off.
Poor Syd nearly fainted.
Bob enjoyed the dinner, which was more than the chicken did.
There is a month of this to go.
Fandabidozi.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here