Tea or Porn?

I have the misfortune to spend a fair amount of time in hotels dotted around the country. They are the sort of places that sit nestled in woodland, just off our finest motorway junctions, and are located, with no other quality in mind than to make them easy to reach. With admirable efficiency they prey upon the tired, homesick and, usually bored delegate-guest with an endless choice of services and entertainments that make the time and effort searching for an alternative seem like utter madness.

Perhaps the Coalition will catch on if they are looking for further cuts because if these places were prisons there would be no need for any security. The easy self-indulgence, comfort and convenience would keep everyone in and at a far cheaper price than guards. Like The Eagles said, 'you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave'. If I manage to dodge the pool and sauna (easy for some of us) and scramble past the restaurants, I am confronted with a bar, probably showing the football and selling bar snacks, an obstacle that can feel as high as any prison wall to an average male. No wonder that, for every Steve McQueen, there are a hundred Dustin Hoffmans who have given in to their fate.

I've been told that the key to seduction is not making a big impression but staying in the game long enough until there are no other exit routes. The big hotel chains have taken this to heart with decor that is finished with the panache of a show house on a new-build estate. Our tastes have been analysed to a point where all personality has been removed. The result is so inoffensive to be rendered almost invisible until I find myself sat in one of the seemingly benign comfortable chairs that block my way to the exit and I realise I have said yes to my third pint of magnolia lager and am eating a fusion burger.

So why the puritanism? We have a choice, don't we? We hear tales of a curry in Hinckley or amateur Shakespeare in Stamford. If you don't want to relax and give in to the easy life, go and do something less boring instead. If all that was at stake was the wasted hours watching Top Gear repeats and the vague guilt of succumbing to a boiled in the bag existence of cultural banality then it wouldn't matter. But what starts off as a harmless evening of Top Gear, can all too easily descend to an hour of the Men and Motors channel and we can guess was that will lead to.

The fact is that the whole culture is exploitative. From the guests to the staff, from the plantation workers harvesting our 'free' cups of tea to the late night film 'stars'. We know the only trickle-down effect that hotels are interested in. (Sorry!) The hotels are remarkable organisms that have evolved with the sole aim of making us indulge ourselves and spend our money. Great minds and centuries of human endeavor have refined this process to give us the impression of choice while really we are being played like a cheap piano. As microcosms of modern society, hotels provide a compelling argument that the only real choice we have is to say 'NO'.

Now, what channel number is Fairtrade Men and Motors?

(I am currently stuck in a hotel just off the M62)