Behind the Hilton's doors

Landing on a hotel in London can be as expensive and depressing in real life as it is in Monopoly. At the dodgier ones, doormen greet you with open palms, while unblinking Barbie dolls in reception give you the traditional hotel greeting ("Being Completely Ignored for 10 Minutes") by all refusing to look up from their computers in perfect synchronicity.

Even when you reach your room, the insanity continues, from the minibar that contains tiny bottles of undrinkably acidic white wine at Châšteau d'Yquem prices, to the words "Do Not Disturb" hung outside your door, which translate into cleaning lady patois as "just walk in through the door without knocking while the gentleman inside is stark naked on the thunderbox".

And although it can take days to get a light bulb changed, every time you leave your room someone will mysteriously creep in, fold the end of your lavatory roll into a neat triangle, and then creep out again.

I've long suspected that the insanity and quirks that plague large metropolitan hotels must begin at the very top, with the owners. And last night's Can't Take it With You (BBC2) confirmed my belief, by profiling the lunacy and intemperance that pervades the most famous hotelier family of them all, the Hiltons.

While the founder, Conrad Hilton, was a model of sobriety and restraint, the billionaire's death in 1979 sparked an internecine feud which has lasted until the present day, and provided US gossip columnists with all the material they could ever possibly need. Because, although Conrad clearly intended to leave almost his entire fortune to the Catholic church and charitable foundations, his children had other ideas, and their subsequent conduct has confirmed the truth of the old saying that where there's a will, there's a way of lawyers encouraging ruinously expensive litigation that will drag on for decades.

With admirable irreverence, the programme introduced us to the chief protagonists: Conrad's children, Francesca and Barron. They'd both decided to contest the will after discovering that each would receive only a token payment, but Francesca had ended up "losing everything", thereby becoming so poor that she had to go and live in Los Angeles with only one hair and make-up artist at her constant beck and call.

The loss of the fortune must have hit her especially hard because her mother is Zsa Zsa Gabor, who is well known for being an expert housekeeper (whenever she got divorced, Zsa Zsa kept the house), and Francesca certainly cuts a sorry figure in Hollywood nowadays, being considerably overweight and over the hill, yet still dreaming of a movie career that will never happen.

"You're shooting too low," she warned the crew as they filmed her, "I don't want to look fat," but, in truth, she had little choice. Put it this way, when you have to hire a seamstress to let out your shower curtain, camera angles are no longer relevant.

Watching Francesca's vast chest heaving to and fro, I suddenly had a money-making idea for marketing "ladies' cheese" (well, women are milk-producing mammals, just like goats and cows, and I reckon there could be a niche market for extra-mature Brunette or a bit of mild Blonde). But I was brought back to reality by an interview with the quietly sinister Barron, who had eventually gained control of the Hilton empire, thereby becoming one of the richest men in America, even though his father had strongly disapproved of the principle of inherited wealth.

Part of the fortune still went to the Catholic church, as Conrad had intended (presumably, it's funding those massive compensation payments to the countless victims of clerical buggery), but most now belongs to Barron (and his feckless "It girl" grandchildren, Paris and Nikki), and his altruistic claim that "my intentions are to leave the majority of my estate to my father's foundation" sat oddly with the decade he'd spent fighting tooth and nail to prevent that same foundation from ever receiving it.