Hotel’s excitement at featuring in Channel 4 show Four in a Bed

Viewers will be able to see later this year if The Portland Hotel, Bar and Kitchen in Ashington is among the winners of a popular television show.

It is one of the participants in the next series of the Channel 4 programme Four in a Bed, where B&B owners or representatives take turns to stay with each other and then decide who offers best value for money.

Filming at The Portland took place last week. Its representatives are bar manager Gary Gray and head waitress Katrina Keech.

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It has grown into a business that has more than 20 employees and provides a 150-seater restaurant.

Co-owner Michael Sproat said: “We were contacted by the programme makers to ask if we would like to be on the show as there are not many of us independents left.

“We agreed to take part and after they had a look around our premises, we were confirmed for the show. We are looking forward to promoting Northumberland.

“Since we put out a message saying that filming would be carried out, we’ve had many supportive comments.

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“I didn’t realise how popular the show is because we’ve had a lot of requests from people to let them know once we are told the dates for our episodes.

“We get people from all over the world staying with us, many of them during their trip to see the Northumberland coast and onto Scotland.

“We also have local residents booking for wedding parties, birthdays, christenings and other events and our employees and food come from a 10 to 15-mile radius.”

Format for the programme each week

As well as staying at each other’s property, the four teams in the show also do an activity in each local area.

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They fill out a feedback form and give ratings for different aspects of their stay, which is anonymous to the host when they first see the forms.

This covers Monday to Thursday. On the Friday episode, they all meet together to find out whose feedback is whose and ask why they liked or did not like something.

Each team then pays what they believe was the correct value for their stay. They will either pay the full amount charged, less than this amount or, in some cases, more than this amount.

The participants get a percentage score and the winning team is the one with the highest score.