Renowned hotelier and author Ruth Watson returns to Five for a third series, continuing her mission to reverse Britain’s reputation for poorly run hotels, guesthouses and B&Bs. In the opening edition, Ruth heads to the East Sussex coast to tackle a hotel whose owner is actively opposed to her ideas before he has even met her.
Ruth is in Hastings to visit the Grand Hotel, a seafront establishment with 17 rooms that is rapidly losing business to the new budget hotels elsewhere in the town. Owner Peter Mann, who has been running the hotel for 18 years, is keen to reverse his fortunes, but is wary of Ruth’s infamous no-nonsense approach even before her arrival. “If she’s going to come here a cross between Darth Vader, Genghis Khan and Gordon Ramsay, then that’s not going to work at all,” he warns.
Unfortunately for Peter, his worst fears are confirmed when he meets Ruth. She is deeply unimpressed by his hotel the moment she sets eyes on it. The frontage is listless and jaded, with peeling paintwork, rusting pipes and dead plants in the windows. “It’s anything but grand,” she grumbles. The reception area is bizarrely situated up a flight of stairs and, inexplicably, guests must ring two bells simultaneously to get Peter’s attention. The lounge area is dominated by tatty paisley sofas, and the bedrooms are spartan, incongruous and grubby. Peter’s reaction to Ruth’s early comments is one of hostility: “I think she’s cold –she uses bad language,” he says. “I don’t like the lady at all.”
After what she describes as “an uncomfortable night’s sleep” on a tired mattress and a tissue-thin duvet, Ruth makes her way to the dining room – where she is in for a shock. The room is stuffed with ornaments, toys and curios from Peter’s travels around the world. Cuddly monkeys jostle for space with Buddhist carvings and china dolls, and there is not a surface visible anywhere in the room. “There is some truly hideous rubbish down here,” says Ruth. “It’s really quite freaky.”
With a monumental task ahead of her, Ruth starts by sending Peter off to a local budget hotel to see how the service and amenities compare with the Grand. She then gives him a checklist of things to do to improve the hotel, including clearing the clutter in the dining room, buying matching towels for the bedrooms and, most importantly, redecorating the hotel’s frontage. After his initial misgivings, Peter is warming to Ruth and begins to value her advice: “We need to put the ‘grand’ back into the Grand Hotel, as Ruth puts it,” he says.
Ruth then inspires Peter to retain the hotel’s character by transforming the dining room into a quasi-museum to Hastings, and the pair decide to throw a re-launch party, to be opened by the town’s mayor. But will Peter finish the renovation work in time for the Grand’s moment in the spotlight, thus sparking an upturn in profit for his flagging hostelry? Whatever happens in the long run, however, Peter seems like a changed man with a newfound ambition to see his hotel restored to its glory days. “Peter Mann has learnt a lot about himself,” he says.
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