 as his career crashed spectacularly. Recalling his inspiration in The Telegraph, co-writer Armando Ianucci said: 'While we were researching it, Steve and Patrick Marber and myself went to a motorway service station hotel that actually was equidistant from London and Norwich, and we stayed there for 24 hours. Most people would check in, have dinner, have breakfast, and get the hell out, but we actually lingered to have lunch. And it was appalling.' It doesn't, however, have to be this way. I've seen the future, and it's just outside Rugby on a roundabout by the M6. Opened last year, Moto Rugby was recently decreed the best motorway services in the UK when it came top in a customer satisfaction survey by watchdog Transport Focus, which canvassed user opinion on 119 sites across the country. It actually received a perfect score of 100 per cent (including in the toilets category). And, though you can't stay here for 24 hours (the nearest hotel is the Premier Inn Rugby North, a two-minute drive away){kind=link}
Rugby Moto services scored a whopping 100 per cent in a recent customer satisfaction survey – but does it really make for a welcome break?
I’m at Toddington Northbound motorway services, home of the world’s first Psychopath-Designed Loos. At least, I’m pretty sure they were designed by a psychopath: only a person with zero empathy and a sadistic streak would have decreed that you had to close these toilets to flush them – meaning the next users have to fiddle around with a mechanism below the toilet rim in order to open them back up. And said psychopath was having a particularly evil laugh when he or she also broke the taps, triggering the sort of hand sanitiser sales in the service station branch of M&S we saw during peak Covid.
Opened in 1959, poor old Toddington Northbound has seen better days. Its lino comes trodden with a pattern of dirty footprints and there’s a persistent smell of stale fast food in the air. This, like many other service stops, is not a place to linger. It’s what Alan Partridge’s creators must have had in mind when they moved him into a fictional motorway hotel (the Linton Travel Tavern) as his career crashed spectacularly.
Recalling his inspiration in The Telegraph, co-writer Armando Ianucci said: “While we were researching it, Steve and Patrick Marber and myself went to a motorway service station hotel that actually was equidistant from London and Norwich, and we stayed there for 24 hours. Most people would check in, have dinner, have breakfast, and get the hell out, but we actually lingered to have lunch. And it was appalling.”
It doesn’t, however, have to be this way. I’ve seen the future, and it’s just outside Rugby on a roundabout by the M6. Opened last year, Moto Rugby was recently decreed the best motorway services in the UK when it came top in a customer satisfaction survey by watchdog Transport Focus, which canvassed user opinion on 119 sites across the country.