Inside Monaco: Playground Of The Rich
I May Destroy You
Rating: 
Prince Albert of Monaco is a clutterbug. If he were living on benefits in Hull, you might see him on some programme with a title like The Nightmare Hoarder Next-Door, with piles of rotting clothes and magazines blocking every window.
But as he is the son of Grace Kelly and ruler of a ludicrously wealthy principality on the Riviera, no one dares tell him to give his office in the palace a tidy — certainly not the obsequious film-maker behind the camera of Inside Monaco: Playground Of The Rich (BBC2).
Albert’s desk is heaped with towers of books and folders of papers. The sideboard is buried under photographs, their frames stacked like LPs in a record shop.
Prince Albert of Monaco is a clutterbug. If he were living on benefits in Hull, you might see him on some programme with a title like The Nightmare Hoarder Next-Door, with piles of rotting clothes and magazines blocking every window
Every spare inch of wall space is hidden by framed medals and certificates. Most precarious of all are the tables crammed with ornaments: glass globes, porcelain statuettes, china birds, bottles, marble balls, lacquered boxes and all manner of tat.
You can’t really blame him. His whole domain looks like that: barely bigger than Hyde Park, Monaco is stuffed with so many buildings that one visitor described it as ‘luxury Legoland’. Space is at such a premium that extendable helipads have been constructed over the water, to give pilots extra room for landings.
Albert granted director Michael Waldman permission to film behind the scenes in the palace and to attend a party or two. This three-part documentary is simply happy to slip past the silken entrance rope and squeeze inside.
In return for access, there are no difficult questions or sharp observations. A couple of brief, fawning interviews with the Prince allow him to get away with saying practically nothing.
Inside Monaco amounts to a promotional video: you can imagine it on a loop in the hotel foyers, an endless cavalcade of air kisses and supercars.
You can’t really blame him. His whole domain looks like that: barely bigger than Hyde Park, Monaco is stuffed with so many buildings that one visitor described it as ‘luxury Legoland’
Waldman was curious to know only what everything cost.
From off-camera, we kept hearing a voice ask: ‘Any idea how much this would be?’ like a nosy customer wasting the sales staff’s time in a jewellery shop.
Thus we learned that a harbour berth for a megayacht is two grand a night, that the biggest bottle of champagne at a reception cost £28,000 and the white truffle in the kitchen is worth £35,000 — the same price as a night in the Princess Grace suite at the Hotel de Paris — and that every Monaco resident must keep half a million in a current account at all times.
Also, the monthly rental of a one-room apartment is . . . oh, really, who cares? The interviewee who reluctantly told us most was a yacht worker called Tommy who refused to reveal the name of his employer: ‘I don’t want to have a horse’s head in my bed tomorrow morning, know what I mean?’ Yes, we get the picture.
One of the parties was an awards ceremony for social media’s Influencer of the Year — the kind of event where you might find Arabella, played by Michaela Coel in her drama serial I May Destroy You (BBC1).
Arabella is a writer, feted for a novel created on Twitter, who goes out clubbing in London with friends and regains consciousness with her phone smashed and her face bleeding.
Slowly, she begins to fear she was drugged and sexually assaulted.
Arabella is a writer, feted for a novel created on Twitter, who goes out clubbing in London with friends and regains consciousness with her phone smashed and her face bleeding
The story is told in half-hour bites, and the first wasn’t enough to gauge yet how engaging it will be.
But Coel is a powerful actress, and I May Destroy You is based on traumatic personal experience.
Give it a couple of weeks: this could be the new Fleabag.
Flimsy evidence of the night: True crime documentary Murder In The Outback (C4) gave us a lot of innuendo to discredit the story Joanne Lees told police about the disappearance of her boyfriend Peter Falconio — but very little hard fact. Frustrating.