Millionaires bemoaning the cost of living crisis? You can but laugh: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV

The Hidden World Of Hospitality

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Code Blue: The Killing Of June Fox-Roberts

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New York has Spiderman. Gotham has Batman. But who will save Manchester?

Never fear, SuperTom is here, with his sidekick, Gary the Boy Wonder!

Restaurateur Tom Kerridge claimed, with breathtaking chutzpah on The Hidden World Of Hospitality (BBC2), that the capital of northern England was barely on the foodie map till he arrived.

‘Manchester had sat in this little bubble for a number of years of not a great deal going on,’ he said, ‘and then, all of a sudden, five years ago, it started these wonderful green shoots of great food.’

Not a great deal going on? That will come as a surprise to the crowded restaurants, bars and nightclubs that earned the city its reputation as the most pulsating party scene in Europe.

Restaurateur Tom Kerridge claimed, with breathtaking chutzpah on The Hidden World Of Hospitality (BBC2), that the capital of northern England was barely on the foodie map till he arrived

Tom Kerridge in the kitchen with The Beefy Boys on an episode of The Hidden World of Hospitality

What was it that happened, according to Tom, that made Manchester come alive? Well, in 2019 he launched his eaterie The Bull And Bear, at the Stock Exchange Hotel — whose co-owner is former England footballer and Labour party cheerleader Gary Neville.

Tom and Gary did such a spectacular job of reviving the restaurant scene that, by the time the Beeb’s cameras caught up with them, The Bull And Bear was closing. This, announced Tom proudly, meant his staff would be free to ‘take up other opportunities’, which sounds much better than being out of work.

Since this episode was filmed in late 2022, the Stock Exchange has opened another restaurant. Last month, that also closed.

It’s inconceivable that this has anything to do with Gary’s failings as a hotelier, because everybody knows that running a business is easy compared to kicking a ball — and the former Man United right-back was so good at kicking a ball that he’s bound to excel at everything else.

He explained to Tom why the restaurant couldn’t keep going: ‘I mean, the cost of living, cost of energy, the fallout of the last few years from Brexit . . . it’s real, it’s massive.’

The spectacle of a millionaire socialist perched on a bar stool in a five-star hotel, blaming the cost of living for his problems, was deliriously funny.

SuperTom’s attitude made me laugh less. ‘I’ve opened and shut restaurants and businesses before,’ he said with an audible shrug. ‘This isn’t the first time, you know, in a 30-year career.’

Well, so long as Tom’s not losing sleep over it, that’s the important thing. This glimpse into his Hidden World has shown us something he might not have intended to reveal: everybody and everything else revolve around him.

How police forensic scientists can go to work and not lose sleep is hard to comprehend, after some scenes in the murder documentary Code Blue: The Killing Of June Fox-Roberts (ITV1). Great-grandmother June was found dead in her Glamorgan home in 2021. Her torso was wrapped in plastic, and her head and limbs were missing.

The murder documentary Code Blue: The Killing Of June Fox-Roberts (ITV1) covers the case of great-grandmother June, who was found dead in her Glamorgan home in 2021 

This has been a gory week for viewers, with the first two episodes of BBC1’s blood-drenched horror thriller Wolf. But the carnage is more distressing when it is real, even though the worst images from police bodycams were blurred out.

The chief suspect was spotted living rough at a nearby haulier’s yard. Police immediately nicknamed him Container Man. That might seem callous, when he could have been ‘Person of Interest A’ or just ‘someone we need to eliminate from our enquiries’.

But confronted with such horrific images, anybody’s instinct might be to focus on one mundane detail, for the sake of sanity.

Container Man was soon discovered, sitting in an alleyway. He was eating from a bag of Haribo sweets. You don’t get more mundane than that.

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