Ireland has a strange relationship with hotels. On the one hand, trendy urbanistas decry them as a scourge upon society – only to inevitably complain when their pals fly in from abroad for a concert and can’t find a room at a decent price. But then there is the success of At Your Service (RTÉ One, Sunday, 7.30pm), in which sibling hoteliers Francis and John Brennan criss-cross the country giving straight-shooter advice to newcomers to the hospitality sector. Hate, love – with hotels, we just can’t make up our minds.
At Your Service isn’t particularly original – it is essentially Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares with dodgy duvets instead of deluded sous chefs on the road to run. But Francis and John know how to play to the cameras and bring larger-than-life energy to the screen.
Still, while the presenters – who run a hotel in Kenmare, Co Kerry – know what they are about, there is an argument that At Your Service requires a lick of paint as it returns for a new season. It’s off to Tralee, where the O’Carroll family – parents Norma and Tony and grown-up sons Anthony, Thomas, and Paul – are opening a hotel in the town centre. They are planning a 26-bedroom boutique hotel, with some of the ground floor rented out as retail space.
The retail element will help with the bottom line, but the Brennans fear it will come at the price of a pokey reception area which could deprive the hotel of ambience. They also worry about the family’s lack of experience in hospitality. “They’ve never served a cup of coffee in their lives – never mind run a hotel,” says Francis.
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At a crunch meeting, Francis and John present the O’Carrolls with three options. The first is a “credit card hotel – no frills”, where guests can check in via app. The second is to go all in on the boutique experience. Thirdly, the family can hand the entire thing over to a management company and let them worry about it.
The O’Connells say they are torn, and the Brennans fret that there are too many cooks and that the business will suffer as a result. The problem is that while these tensions are acknowledged by the family, we never see them on screen.
It goes without saying that nobody wants to watch people exploited in the name of entertainment, but the opening episode really needs to capture on camera some of the reported sharp disagreements between the Carrolls. We don’t even know who in the family is pushing to abandon the plans for a ground floor retail space – and who is inclined to stick with them. Cards are kept too close to the chest.
The episode finishes with a last-minute dash to get the hotel bar ready. But again, the lack of tension is telling – there is no sense of jeopardy or that anything meaningful is on the line. The crucial spark of drama is striking by its absence – without it, At You Service risks being nothing beyond a public information video about opening a hotel.
Francis and John are full of charm and have taken up a place in the affections of viewers somewhere between Daniel O’Donnell and celebrity architect Dermot Bannon. It isn’t their fault that they have returned with a fizz-free instalment. Bringing the oomph is the producers’ job, and the hope must be that they will restore some of that crucial buzz as the season continues.
