Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby

Our friend "the purple hotel" in Newcastle

I don't get to stay in amazing hotels. I get to stay in Premier Inns. They're fine - more than fine, in fact - but they don't tend to come with a rooftop infinity pool. And you don't get much foraging for wild partridgeberries outside a Table Table. But that's OK. Needs must. Sometimes, however, it's fun to see how the other half (or much tinier fraction than that) live.

Giles Coren and Monica Galetti are off to explore some of the world's more unusual hotels. Because they work for the BBC, they don't just get to gloat at us from a sunlounger, they're expected to pitch in to cover the cost of their board and lodging. No problem for Monica, deputy chef to Michel Roux Jr and capable of doing a full Haka of facial expressions when overseeing a skills test on Masterchef. But Giles has no apparent talent for anything, apart from winding people up. I would just like to extend a sympathetic hand to his sister Victoria, for managing to do rather well in life despite having such an annoying tit for a brother.

Giles can't take a single task seriously. Expertly feng shui interiors? He deliberately moves objects off diagonals. Help with the laundry cart? He hitches a ride on the back of it. Help with the valet parking? He nearly crashes a Ferrari like a boy racer in a multistorey. (And a valet parking job is a real privilege, since it costs 55,000 dollars to own a car in Singapore, which none of the staff can afford.) And then Giles is useless when he's not even trying. Check in? He can't find the reception desks, he says, though they are clearly in shot behind him. Deliver valets back to reception? He can't work his walkie talkie at the same time as driving a golf buggy. Iron the pool towels? He can't insert them into the machine. But he's full of smart alec comments about it all, as though it's all terribly beneath him. He also wants his mum to take in his trousers for him. Giles, it seems (and this becomes even more apparent in subsequent episodes), is quite the male chauvinist. Monica, on the other hand, soon gets stuck in, rolling up dim sum and enthusing about the chocolate room and the uniform delivery system. Take note, Michel, for she will soon be demanding her chef's whites be sent by conveyor belt direct to her wardrobe.

Their first hotel is the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, which opened in 2010. It consists of three towers with what looks like a giant surfboard perched on top of them. The cathedral-sized lobby is full of Antony Gormleys. The suites have their own karaoke rooms. It's a far cry from Raffles.

The surfboard is actually a rooftop garden and swimming pool, whose water somehow manages to not tip out 55 storeys on to the streets below whenever someone dives in. It's all to do with 500 finely balanced jacks, the architectural plans tell us. In reality, the pool is used as one permanent giant selfie shot, and while the programme is quite to give us lots of hotel statistics (cost to build, room rates, uniform numbers, casino wins, towels laundered, kilos of cauliflower consumed), it doesn't mention how many iPhones get dropped and drowned in its waters. But I'm reckoning on several hundred a year.

The hotel didn't exist when we went to Singapore en route to New Zealand in 2006, not that it would have been within our budget. Our visit there is a bit of a jetlagged blur of sweaty heat, temples and office blocks, colonial mansions and cocktails, expensive shopping malls and wonderful street food, and a cable car and a dolphin show on Sentosa Island. I remember getting off our flight from London and feeling like I'd been punched into a bowl of cloying soup. The humidity left you limp.

Everything was terribly clean and ordered.  If this was Asia, it felt like a terribly sanitised version of it. The Disneyland edition. There were a lot of rules about how to behave on the MRT. No chewing gum, no flammable liquids, no durians. (For more on durians, see Dara O'Briain and Ed Byrne on the Road to Mandalay, broadcast last night.) I don't remember much about our hotel (a Swissotel overlooking Boat Quay) other than the air conditioned bliss of its bedroom. I remember Raffles more, where we called in for the obligatory sling, if only because the floor of the bar was covered in discarded monkey nut shells. Very crunchy.

The rest of it was a strange mix of technology meeting tradition, and distinct cultures and religions (Muslim, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist), all in a tiny (and literal) melting pot. We spotted the same Victorian floor tiles from our flat in Crouch End used in the Thian Hock Keng temple, a touch of the colonial British that Dara O'Briain also noticed in Penang last night:

We didn't have nearly enough time to explore in our brief sojourn before it was time to catch our onward flight to Auckland. We had even less time in Singapore on our return leg, a mere six hours in orchid-filled Changi airport, which also has a swimming pool. We used the time purely to grab some sleep in the airport hotel, where you can rent a room by the dodgy-sounding hour. It was a blissful interruption - complete with shower - to 29 hours of flying in economy. But even further removed from anything the Marina Bay Sands has to offer. Unless you can rent a sunbed by the infinity pool without paying the extortionate overnight rate.

Stargazing Live: Australia

Rare sunshine at Jodrell Bank

On the day that Theresa Mayhem unleashes the hell of triggering Article 50 on the UK, it's good to be served a reminder of how insignificant our country and planet is in the grand scheme of things. And there is nothing like a spot of staring at the heavens to do just that. We are but a microscopic dot amongst billions of stars.

Stargazing Live has temporarily moved to Australia, probably because it's always cloudy and raining at Jodrell Bank, which kind of defeats the object of the programme. Although today it looks like the stargazers have moved directly into the path of Cyclone Debbie instead, which makes your average Manchester rain seem rather tame in comparison.

Plus from Oz you get an angle on the Milky Way that you just can't see from Europe. A scale model of the galaxy shows us where our solar system lies, on a surprising diagonal (which apparently explains why Australia gets a different view to us). Our solar system is the tiniest line on the Milky Way, which is itself just a weeny fraction of the galaxy. And then there's a whole lot more universe after that. As I say, it makes Brexit seem irrelevant. Almost.

It's presented as usual by Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain, who are sitting beside an empty billy can swinging above a campfire. You can reach them on Twitter. The sun is rising over there just as it's setting here. Saturn's rings are on good form, and the last star left in the sky is actually Jupiter. All of which should encourage the audience in its search for the elusive Planet 9 in our solar system. Apparently we aren't done with Pluto - there's another one out there somewhere.

A slightly eccentric stargazer tells us how the Aborigines use the stars to plan their farming. Another shows us how his bald head has come to resemble an observatory, and explains how telescopes don't take photos any more, but instead use fibreoptics to gather data about something I couldn't even begin to understand. Personally, I'm still big on the photographs, because I want to see what's up there and - well, they are rather pretty. Then there's the man who used the radiotelescope to communicate with the doomed Apollo 13 expedition. And then there's a group of people trailing through the blazing desert to try and find a tiny meteorite that has fallen from a comet. They are risking sunburn and dehydration - not to mention spiders, snakes and all sorts of other scary creatures. They can't talk much for fear of swallowing a fly.

But for Dara, trying to release his inner Attenborough (and badly), it's all about the kangaroos. Here they go, the giant "bouncing mice" hopping round and round the observatory. But then he goes and calls Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott "Clint Liftoff". That's what you get for talking too fast. Brilliant.

I highly recommend a visit to Stargazing's usual home at Jodrell Bank, by the way. We went last summer during a trip to Wilmslow. The sheer scale of that telescope is mind-blowing. And it rotates on train tracks. A lot of the Discovery Centre probably went over our reception-age daughter's head (I'd say age 8 plus and you're on to a winner), but she enjoyed a tour of the "history of creation" garden, moving the planets around the sun in a ceiling mobile of the solar system, talking to me through the "whispering dishes", dressing up as an astronaut and making a flag to stick on the moon. I also like to think that some of the interactive science exhibits about black holes in the Space Pavilion may have sunk somewhere into the back of her mind for future reference.

Apparently Brian Cox was on Postman Pat this morning. I wish my daughter wasn't growing up so fast and therewith growing out of CBeebies. I might have to sneakily watch it on iPlayer. Because I sure as hell don't want to see Nigel Farage's gloating face on the news today.