CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: The hotel where the host secretly snoops on the guests

Reunion Hotel (BBC2) **

Garage for classic cars (yesterday) ****

It started as a lavish Long Lost Family with room service, but Reunion Hotel (BBC2) has become the scariest show on the box.

In part, it is the cameras in bedrooms that constantly monitor guests. One shot saw a newcomer walk right up to a spy lens and place a water bottle in front of it: he was clearly oblivious to the fact that it was filming him.

Another guest was seen repeatedly lying face down on his bed, tapping a tablet and chatting on the phone.

It’s a point of view familiar from reality game shows like Big Brother, but it feels intrusive in a format supposedly based on reuniting friends and family on neutral ground, in a North Wales hotel.

Presenter Alex Jones, who came across as overly respectful and polite in the first episode, has now swung too far the other way. She listens at the door and withholds information so we can enjoy the shocked looks when she chooses to reveal secrets.

And she sometimes treats people like animals in an experiment. She hosted a garden party for a group of women who traveled to the North Pole together in the 1990s and watched them from a window. ‘Look,’ she marveled, ‘after 25 years they have completely recognized each other.’

However, the most disturbing element is the way both Alex and the show’s therapists stand in the foyer discussing the guests’ personal lives with the waiter and receptionist. It’s clearly staged, but it’s also unnerving.

Reunion Hotel is a big part of the counseling and psychological support provided to participants.

Usually this means that they are constantly asked, “How are you feeling?” – before their answers are sent directly to a gossip chat box at the front desk.

Each of the encounters seems chosen to be as different as possible from the others. This can sometimes feel tense. Two people who broke up as teens 12 years ago had an awkward heart-to-heart relationship, made more difficult by the fact that one of them had grown up as a woman but was now a trans man named Noah.

The first meeting between Ghana-born Kwesi and the daughter he had never seen was touching with their heartfelt emotion and tears.

But outside at the garden party, the ladies’ gathering felt rather corporate, like an anniversary for former classmates from a girls’ public school.

In the workshop of the Classic Car Garage (yesterday), owners and mechanics are not paying attention to the cameras.

Their vintage vehicles draw all the attention, a fact this channel discovered with its long-running auction show Bangers And Cash.

The biggest attention seeker was a 1960s Daimler Sovereign with a loose wire in the steering column that caused the horn to blare at every corner.

In the workshop of the Classic Car Garage (yesterday), owners and mechanics are not paying attention to the cameras

This was the first episode of a series filmed in a London garage where owners can tinker with their prized engines, while experts provide advice and assistance.

Most eyes were drawn to an open sports car with a growl like a grizzly bear on steroids. “It’s just lairy, no other word for it,” happily declared the owner of this 289 AC Cobra – although he would have been even happier if the vehicle had been an original.

There are less than half a dozen left in the world and they bring in over $1 million.

This one had an intermittent fault with an indicator. Mechanic Amand, known to colleagues as the Prof, stuck himself upside down in the footwell under the steering wheel to test the loom of 40 electrical wires.

“You have to be flexible in this job,” he said, adding, “I also have a good osteopath.”