Sin City: The Real Las Vegas (BBC3)
Want to make a million dollars a day? It’s easy — just invite a crowd of idiots to stand up to their thighs in water, ply them with cheap cocktails, and label it ‘high-octane fun’.
Pool parties, where tourists wade around in swimwear getting sloshed and dancing, are taking over from the casinos as the biggest attraction in Las Vegas.
The sun is always blazing in this city in the middle of the Nevada desert, but a tan doesn’t come cheap — expect to pay between $500 and $2,000 (£365 to £1,460) for a day’s rental on a sunbed.
In the two-part documentary Sin City: The Real Las Vegas (repeated on Wednesday night on BBC1), reporter Tir Dhondy took a lime-green limo to her first pool party, but kept her feet dry.
For some reason, she didn’t seem to fancy being an ingredient in the human soup.
Events promoter Joel, a British expat, handed her a gun that sprayed dollar bills and boasted of his ‘big clients’, including ‘adult entertainment stars. They hired a helicopter with a machine gun and we went and shot some targets in the desert.’
Vegas has been the tackiest town in America since the days when Elvis was squeezing into elasticated rhinestone jumpsuits. But what passes for glamour now is seedy beyond belief.
Stag parties come for the sex shows and the drugs, another promoter said. The Australians are the worst behaved, but the Brits do the most cocaine.
In the two-part documentary Sin City: The Real Las Vegas (repeated on Wednesday night on BBC1), reporter Tir Dhondy investigates the seedier side of Sin City
Vegas has long been the tackiest town in America since the days when Elvis was squeezing into elasticated rhinestone jumpsuits
For a town full of nothingness, Vegas offers some gruesome sights. In tunnels built as storm drains, Dhondy met some of the city’s homeless drug casualties
Dhondy interviewed one man whose girlfriend ended up in hospital after two men spiked her drink at a pool party. He was drugged too, by a pair of women who took him back to his hotel room and robbed him.
When he filed a complaint with police, they laughed at him and asked what else he expected in Vegas.
We also expect weirdos, of course. Dhondy found a few, but though she has a gift for winning people’s confidence, she probes too lightly, and sometimes apologises for asking personal questions. As a result, I often felt there were stories left untold.
One who wouldn’t shut up was a YouTube celebrity who claimed to be banned from every casino for winning too much money. His method was simple, he explained: ‘They want to subconsciously direct you to lose money. But I saw through it and kept winning.’
His face was covered in tattoos, including one of Salvador Dali on his neck, and his eyes were out on stalks. ‘As far as you can see,’ he burbled, ‘there’s nothingness.’
For a town full of nothingness, Vegas offers some gruesome sights. In tunnels built as storm drains, Dhondy met some of the city’s homeless drug casualties.
One of them lived under a grill in the sidewalk at the bottom of Caesar’s Palace. When he looked up, he could see the neon lights. That’s a blunt force metaphor.
