TV Review: Hotel for Refugees (BBC1). Islam meets Catholicism: How can people be this nice?

Plus: Rick Stein’s Road to Mexico (BBC2)

From left: Jackie, Ghassan, Ahlam, Seeham, Jenan, and Judy in Ballaghaderreen, Ireland (BBC/Films of Record)

Hotel for Refugees was much the most touching television in a very long time. The arrival of a couple of hundred Syrian refugees at a small town in the west of Ireland with a population of 1,800, and previously virtually untouched by immigration, might not have gone well. And yet it did go extraordinarily well, and so far as one could see, religion was the cause – a deeply ironic thing given what religious differences have done to the welfare of the peoples of the Middle East and the island of Ireland alike over the centuries.

Then again, the fact that Ballaghaderreen was unused to inward migration did not mean it had no folk history of outward migration from the town and country. Those in the Irish diaspora (declaration of interest there) understand better than most the manmade and natural disasters that can drive people from their homes and homelands, when they’d have otherwise no wish to do so. They understand too the hostility and racism in “host” populations, all too ready to stick labels on them and believe in generalisations. Such as, in Britain, that the Irish were all thick terrorist sympathisers, “white n*****s” good for digging roads and not much else. “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” was the notice on the boarding house doors in the 1950s; from Boston, Massachusetts in the 1840s to Birmingham in the 1970s, the Irish know what it is to de despised.

Certainly some of the residents in County Roscommon made reference to their own troubled history – Mary, for example, who runs a gloriously old-fashioned haberdashery. I was struck by how open the devout Catholics were to the new arrivals with their unfamiliar religion (the nearest mosque stands 20 miles away). The government took the opportunity to turn an abandoned luxury hotel (a sad legacy of Ireland’s go-go Celtic tiger years) into a comfortable and safe home for the refugees. The residents of the town went out of their way to show the new arrivals around and give them presents and introduce them to the wonders of the Irish way of life. Maybe one day one of the Syrian lads will grow up to be a star of the Gaelic football scene. It wouldn’t be so strange, sure.

It takes two, though, and the Syrian tradition of Islam is obviously a more inclusive one than some others, and this helped. Syrian grannies wanted to join the knitting circle and to take their young ones to see Catholic mass at Easter and say a few prayers with the priest – unlikely pioneers of ecumenical harmony as they might first appear. It was all a bit “Craggy Island meets the Road to Damascus” and all the grander for it. The Syrian boys were sweet and true to their own faith, but keen to be equally Irish and Syrian within weeks of their arrival – complete with shamrock face paint for the Pat’s Day celebrations.

So joyously positive was this account of Christian and Islamic generosity that I simply feared for the future, which surely cannot be as calm and united as it is now. Sooner or later someone will do something wrong, and that will be the test of the community’s resilience – recognising that the Irish are as capable of being badly behaved or prone to crime as any Syrian. Already there were hate leaflets being anonymously distributed purporting to tell the “truth” about 1,400 years of Islam – though the peaceful Syrians gave the lie to that crude propaganda – or that they were just scroungers. You couldn’t listen to a 20-year-old lad tell how his mum was shot to death in front of him, dying in his arms and not want to help. That’s why programmes such as this are so important – to tell some important truths.

I’d like to see a return to Ballaghaderreen to see how the integration is getting along. I have high hopes that the Syrians will re-invigorate the community and make it an even happier, more prosperous place. They’ll have to keep working at it though, and praying, preferably together.

Maybe there is automatic TV-chef-progamme-format-generator software that sits in commissioning editor’s offices, so formulaic have things become almost to the point of randomness. I’d not be shocked, given the existence of Rick Stein’s Road to Mexico, for example. There was really only the most tenuous justification for giving Rick a seven-episode series following him and his frying pan from San Francisco to Mexico City, but there you go – that’s telly in 2017. I admit that Rick was his usual charming, unpretentious down-to-earth self, that the recipes looked tasty (especially the macaroni cheese) and that I was enchanted by the wok warehouse he discovered in Chinatown. But still…

So I’ve come up with a few more programme suggestions based on my own random TV-chef-show-format-generator, comprising a pin and a Wikipedia list of the member states of the United Nations. On this basis I’m offering up to the channel controllers on all channels the following new proposals: Nigella’s Taste of Togo; Jamie Oliver’s Solomon Islands Kitchen; and, though maybe a bit samey to the Jamie, Gordon Ramsay’s Comoros Hell’s Kitchen. I’m just waiting for the call.