Streets of Gold: Mumbai review – Three helicopters, 168 cars, 600 staff… at home with India’s super-rich, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

Streets of Gold: Mumbai

Judgement:

Silent witness

Judgement:

There is a family like her on every street, the competitive neighbors who always have to do better than everyone else.

A fancier car, a louder barbecue party. . . a bigger skyscraper. It’s really annoying.

My heart goes out to Indian billionaire Jimmy Mistry, who probably feels deprived of all satisfaction in his 22-storey home and headquarters, Della Tower in Mumbai – based on the mythical splendor of the ancient Persian palace Persepolis.

From his penthouse, Jimmy explained in Streets Of Gold: Mumbai (BBC2), he can look down on the roof of the simple family home where he grew up. Unfortunately, he can also see super-rich neighbor Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey monstrosity, Antilia, built at a cost of a whopping £1.5 billion.

With three helipads, parking for the Ambanis’ 168 luxury cars and a ‘snow room’ where real snowflakes swirl, Antilia looks disturbingly like a tower of Jenga blocks about to fall. Only five people live there. . . and their 600 resident employees.

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Silent Witness is a crime drama produced by the BBC

The locals living in the shadow of the tower were cautiously diplomatic, insisting that the billionaire family were all incredibly nice. Apparently one of them even waves every now and then. It is important to get along well with the neighbors.

This three-part series, which shows what life is like for the residents of India’s boomtown, also takes care not to cause any offence. The cameras follow various tycoons, self-styled celebrities among Mumbai’s one percent population, as they tour their mansions and hang out at their PR events.

Fashion designers Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla showed their art collection. Their treasures were bought in bulk and crammed onto every inch of wall and shelf, the way doting grandparents display their grandchildren’s finger paints.

Novelist Shobhaa De, billed as ‘the Jackie Collins of India’, showed us how she was honored at a book launch for her memoir, Insatiable. By the time we got to Abu and Sandeep’s latest runway show, this documentary was starting to look like a corporate video.

There was no hint of any darkness behind the shine and glitz, and certainly no awkward questions. Director Philip McCreery met mogul Gautam Singhania, whose own skyscraper, JK House, is even taller than Antilia at 36 floors.

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: The episode was lifted by star turns from John Hannah as a retired pathologist and murder suspect, and Josette Simon as a detective trying to solve a case that has haunted her for twenty years, as every retiring TV buyer always does

Much was made of his business acumen, but not a word was said about his divorce from fitness coach Nawaz Modi, who is believed to claim 75 percent of his fortune.

Instead, the focus on trivia was relentless. Jimmy Mistry complained of a bad back in his Persian palace, which now seemed little more than a bungalow. He brought in an “astro-architect,” Neeta Sinha, whose job title implies she could build him a skyscraper that touches the stars.

Unfortunately, she was just an astrologer with a penchant for interior design, who recommended hanging plants (to channel “bad energy” to the lower floors) and yellow fabric (to brighten the space).

Emilia Fox, as Dr Nikki Alexander in Silent Witness (BBC1), was on the trail of a serial killer with a decidedly Gothic taste in interior design: trees decorated with dead crows, corpses posed with candles at church altars, that sort of thing.

The episode was lifted by John Hannah as a retired pathologist and murder suspect, and Josette Simon as a detective trying to solve a case that has haunted her for twenty years, as any retiring TV buyer always does.

For Dr. Nikki and her colleague Jack (David Caves), this was an unwanted distraction from their smooth love affair. They start each day in the morgue by holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes with gooey smiles.

This is so weird that you could almost be jealous of the bodies on the record. At least they are not aware of it.