See for yourself how it turns out when Harriet brings the family to London for the unveiling.įrench voters head to the polls Sunday for the final round of parliamentary elections, with centrist President Emmanuel Macron's coalition looking to hold off a challenge from a newly formed leftwing alliance.
All she asks of him is that her portrait is not “wacky”. “I’m slightly worried she’s so cheerful,” he says of Harriet.īy the time Pearson Wright leaves Shetland after their sitting he’s professing his love. She is matched with Stuart Pearson Wright, best known for his ability to reflect a hidden sadness in his subjects.
This week’s subject is Harriet Middleton from Lerwick, proud Shetlander, granny, cancer survivor, knitter and charity fundraiser extraordinaire (£110k plus to buy an MRI machine). Find inspiring individuals whose faces would not normally be found on the walls of a gallery, introduce them to a renowned artist, and await the results. Not the matt emulsion kind of painting, the stuff involving canvases and easels, as seen in Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year and in a recent arrival on the block, Extraordinary Portraits (BBC1, Monday, 11.10pm). There is something about painting shows that is naturally pleasing. For some reason the word Titanic bobs to the surface.Ĭan the couple change their ways fast enough to rescue the business, or will they become just another failure in what was, even before the pandemic, a tough market to crack? You are the captains,” she tells them as she drives off into the sunset with the promise/threat of returning soon to check on progress. But the pair know she is right and set about taking her advice, starting with a gut of the bedrooms. “She’s got a hell of a temper,” says Bharat. What follows is vintage, Hotel Inspector, watch-through-the-fingers stuff. “I went to bed cross and I woke up even more irate,” says Polizzi. It is one very unhappy guest who wakes the next morning in one of the hotel’s £89 a night “prestige” rooms, especially after finding hair in the shower that was not her own.
Polizzi, in keeping with her brief, has to stay the night to get the full guest experience. Outside the building looks dishevelled, inside it is chaotic and unclean. Polizzi’s heart sinks even before she is through the front door. Two years in, the place is haemorrhaging money and the pair are working round the clock and getting nowhere. They had no connection to Thailand and, more importantly, no experience in hospitality. The couple spent their life savings buying the Thai Derm Spa and guesthouse in Loughborough.
Whatever, you would not want to be on the end of one, as Hasmeeta and her husband Bharat are in the first of a new series of the reliably excellent The Hotel Inspector (Channel 5, Thursday, 9pm). In keeping with her hospitality background, Alex Polizzi’s tellings off would probably be named “the handryer treatment”. Ninety minutes that will live long in the memory.įootball lore has it that any player who incurred the displeasure of Sir Alex Ferguson risked being on the end of a dressing room blast of wrath known as the “hairdryer treatment”. None of these men were the sort you would want to offend with insensitivity or ignorance, and fortunately there was none of that. The trust between the filmmakers and the filmed was remarkable. There was nothing in the preview I saw about how the film came about, or how long it took to make, which I would like to have known. They had been changed forever, and remain so to this day. “A 762 high velocity bullet,” comes the reply.įor many, the toughest times came when the war was over and they had to return to “real life”. “What was going through your head,” the interviewer asks one platoon commander. There is humour of the bleakest sort here, as you might imagine. Their stories are shocking and testament to the sheer bloody horror of war, but they also show the strength of the bond between brothers in arms. Some have never told anyone what they saw and did. Quietly, with hesitation and without bravado, they talk through their experiences.