Weaver's Week 2025-09-14

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Made by Tuesday's Child for ITV network, 6 – 30 August

Last year, The Fortune Hotel spent a couple of weeks on primetime ITV, and we reviewed it at the time. It was a decent enough show, the germ of a great format was in there but not on display. "Would we watch a second series? Probably."

Upgrade that to "Yes." We're not going to give a complete review of the show – the basic format hasn't altered – but concentrate on the things that have changed for the second series.

Some of the notes we gave last year have been addressed. The hotel is clearly situated in Grenada, specifically the Silversands hotel on Grand Anse Beach (rack price for a room: £700 per night). This year's challenges made more of the island location, clearly labelling the map as being in and around St. George's on the south-west coast of the Caribbean island.

This year's opening episode showed off Grenada to the satisfaction of the tourist board. The teams were taken from the airport to a harbour, where they were given seats on a motorboat, and a newspaper with a crossword to complete. Going to the Reception Desk – which was floating on the ocean – showed that the aim was to get a room key and check in to the hotel.

First five couples to arrive were allowed to pick a case – four of them were empty, one of them contained the £250,000 fortune. All of these cases were opened in front of the other players: can the fortune holders keep a calm face when they see £OODLES in front of them?

The other six couples picked a case from another pile – five empty, one contained the Dreaded Early Checkout Card. And when Briony and Chelsey picked that card, they were out before they were even in. And – unlike certain other X-based shows – they wouldn't be parachuted in during the series.

Then it was to the Nightcap At The Lady Luck Bar, which gained graphics to show who had the fortune and who had the card. These graphics weren't particularly easy to see, a gold and a red dagger shown on a dark background, the latter almost designed to fade away.

Another of the Day Trip Challenges was a chase around Grenada to find Stephen. The locations correlate to real places on the island, and we leave it as an exercise for the reader to find them on maps, and to work out where Stephen Mangan is.

There were no changes to the regular day: the Fortune Holders award the Early Checkout Card to someone else, then there's a Hotel Challenge to determine who gets to peek or to swap, a Day Trip Challenge to determine picking order, and then the Nightcap. (The Hotel Challenge is renamed from last year, when it was known as the Room Service Challenge, and it changed its name for the very simple reason that some challenges take place at the pool or elsewhere in the grounds.)

One major change came with who got to remove £10,000 per night from the case. Last year, the money was removed each night from the third episode; this time around, the withdrawals took place on the first five nights of the game. We think this is a positive move, it ensured that teams had to chase the cash from the start of the series and couldn't coast through the first few episodes.

Another welcome change came with the casting and editing. Right from the start, there were no favourites on the show – everyone got a fair crack of time on screen, perhaps a little more for the Fortune Holders and the Unfortunates but that's entirely defensible for editorial reasons. Last year, we felt that a few couples were ignored for significant parts of the show; this year, everyone contributed well.

A small change to the peek-or-swap results of the Hotel Challenge, which is now done in a specific Luggage Room. Last year, it was done by leaving the cases outside the couples' room, which felt a bit too open to accidentally revealing information.

Last week, we mentioned that players on Destination X were not adopting the "gameplay" technique: make an alliance, keep someone close, then pick your moment to stab them in the back and eliminate them from the game. It's an idea adapted from the original Latin, pioneered by Brutus and his late mate Julius Caesar.

This year's champions on The Fortune Hotel were "gameplay" to the max: every time they ended up with power over who to eliminate, they would eliminate the strongest pair left in the game, no matter how friendly they had been earlier in the episode. Lying and conniving can be an art form, and the winners gave us a masterclass on turning skulduggery into victory.

There was also a prime exhibition of sheer luck. Remember how the series opened with teams racing to find a room key? The last team to arrive somehow lucked into getting the fortune on the first night, they held it for two more nights, and withdrew £30,000 from the case. All the while, they put up a front of complete incompetence, of not being very good at anything and certainly not able to keep a secret terribly well. Indeed, this couple came within a gnat's crotchet of winning the whole show, which would have been unbelievable from the first challenge.

In the broadcast schedules, The Fortune Hotel was head-to-head competition with Destination X. While the BBC show did not impress us, Destination X did have something The Fortune Hotel lacked: a piece of interactivity. Viewers could watch Destination X and place their cross on the map, see if they would do better than the players on the telly. We couldn't play along with The Fortune Hotel; it was a piece of drama, the winners were already determined before we started to watch.

Does the lack of interactivity explain why The Fortune Hotel struggled in the ratings, while Destination X succeeded? Perhaps; the web game will have encouraged a lot more people to watch Destination X live and try to earn their Eurocrat badge. The Fortune Hotel can try to fight back with a playalong turn-to-section-400 adventure game book, but it's not the same.

Viewing figures have, again, been a little disappointing; perhaps ITV might not have given the BBC a week's head start before beginning The Fortune Hotel. This column found the second series to be very much superior to the first, they've added to a viable formula, quietly dropped elements that don't work, and it feels a much tidier and well-made show. But being well-made seems not to bring in audiences.

We fear that The Fortune Hotel will be a two-and-out, and won't return to our screens next year. This will be a shame, it's one of the few shows we would choose to watch even if we weren't reviewing it.

No, you hang up After 38 years, telephone voting on BBC entertainment programmes has come to an end. Scheduled to be trialled on The Late Late Breakfast Show in November 1986, and then actually run on Mike Smith's Chartbeater feature on Radio 1, phone votes hit the big time on Bob Says... Opportunity Knocks, and then spread like a rash across the schedules. No show was immune to the televote and phone-in quiz, a regular feature on Going for Gold and Masterchef and Today's the Day, although University Challenge had its butler take the phone off the hook during its broadcast hours so it could pretend to be out.

However, time marches on, and viewer tastes change. Earlier this year, British Telecom said that it was going to stop offering premium rate phone votes, and they couldn't replace the last employee with 0898-ology. This week, the Beeb confirmed that premium rate phone voting has ended. Future votes, on Strictly Come Dancing and Eurovision Song Contest and Michael Portillo's Hands-On Guide To Lower Saxony, will be on the website and nowhere else.

The funeral will take place at Langham Place on the 31st of this month, when the choir will sing the deceased's favourite anthem, "Please seek the bill payers permission and do not call after voting as closed as your vote won't be counted but you may still be chargéd."

The ITV Television Awards Poll Winner's Party took place this week, hosted by Joel Dommett from Survivor. The awards are entirely voted by the audience, and are a reliable marker for who's of interest to the mass market. Game show winners were:

• Reality competition – I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here
• Quiz show – The 1% Club
• The Ant and Dec award for best television presenter(s) – Ant and Dec Gary Lineker
• Talent show – Strictly Come Dancing

Slightly rare that we come away from Mastermind with a feeling that justice may not have been done. Happened this week when Roger Easy came away with more points, having scored well on the England men's cricket team under Michael Atherton, and done decently well in his general knowledge set. Lucy Fleming had put together a perfect round on dolphins and porpoises, and scored heavily in the late stages of her second round. But Lucy had had so many near misses, at one point mixing up Doctors Who Colin and Tom Baker. She also missed narrowly on the flag of Mozambique. Beth Leonard made just one error on specialist subject Eva Cassidy, and the best general knowledge round of the night came from Ruaidhrí Ó Donnell. Any of the four could have won, Roger did.

A draw on Only Connect between the Doctors Matthews and the Keyboard Worriers, broken in the Doctors' favour. The Worriers were actually a little better on the Connections, picking up people who had body pats named after them, while the Docs had a bonus on ways to get to Amarillo. The Doctors had the better of the Sequences, with Wallace and Gromit antagonists and the faces of Rushmore presidents. Could have heard more tv shows merged with Taylor Swift songs.

Perfection on the walls allowed for a brief discussion of the New York Times' weak-sauce wall knockoff "Connections"; Victoria's description of it as "annoyingly weak" is most generous. Although, if we're in nit-picky mode, the group on the Walls here of "games where you have to lie" contained "Wink Murder", which isn't so much about fibbing as about being sly and stealthy and undetected.

University Challenge was hard work, between two postgraduate Oxbridge colleges. Darwin Cambridge beat Green Templeton Oxford by 135-130. Having led for the first half of the show, Darwin were pegged back, and had to snap out some very fast answers to claim the narrow victory. As one might expect from the low scores, this was not a match of accuracy, Darwin were right in just 44% of the questions they faced, and 44% on bonuses.

What have we got for you this week? New series of The 3rd Degree (Radio 4, Sun) and Dress the Nation (ITV, Sun). Another chance to miss Password (ITV, Sat). Live events cause disruption to BBC daytime schedules, including a couple of days when Bargain Hunt is off air! And Bargain Hunt never goes off the air! It's the Strictly Come Dancing Launch Show next Saturday (BBC1), and a new run of The Money List (RTÉ1).

And why are we publishing on a Friday? We'll tell you next week, in a piece provisionally entitled "What I Did On My Summer Holly Days".

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