Orange is, you may have noticed, the dominant colour of EasyJet's livery. There's nothing wrong with a good, strong colour for brand identification; nobody's going to mind an orange overdose if they only have to put up with it during a short flight to Europe. But what if your whole holiday were orange? You get off your orange flight onto an orange cruise ship and into a cabin with an orange ceiling, an orange bed box and an orange shower. Imagine that and you imagine EasyCruise, the latest master plan from the "serial entrepreneur" Stelios Haji-Ioannou. "I may have overdone the orange," admits Stelios.

EasyCruise launches this weekend from Nice and will zigzag its way around the Côte d’Azur and the Italian Riviera on a weekly basis throughout the summer. With double cabins starting at just £50 per night, it could do for cruising what the no-frills revolution did for the air- line industry. In 10 years, we might all be sailing around nice bits of Europe on Ryancruise, BMI Babycruise and a thousand other boats like this one, for next to nothing.

Or we might not. It probably all depends on how the orange thing goes down.

I write to you from the depths of EasyCruiseOne on the morning of its inaugural voyage. And I’m going to get the bad stuff out of the way first. We’re docked in Nice, which should be beautiful at this time of year, but I don’t know if it is or it isn’t yet, because my cabin doesn’t have a window. Only the suites, which start at a more princely £159 per night, have access to daylight. My cabin is 10 square metres or, in old money, not remotely big enough to swing a cat in. It is supposed to sleep two.

My night’s sleep was a strange one.

At first, the utter darkness you get in a windowless cabin was rather comforting. But then, as I listened to the hollow echoes of the crew in the corridors, and the photographer in the cabin next door chatting on his mobile, it became ... less comforting. Some might call it irritating. Others might call it oppressive.

I woke on three occasions, each time with more gasping, fish-out-of-water panic. I don’t know if it was psychological or whether they’d cut the air supply off for fun, but I found it hard to breathe. Oh, for a window with a breeze, and for people to stop marching up and down the corridor all the time. At least it wasn’t far to the toilet. If I’d left the sliding door open, and had more time to practise, I could have hit the target without even getting out of bed.

Then there’s that orange, which you don’t notice in absolute darkness, but which hits you like a searing hangover when you switch on the very bright lights. Wouldn’t it have been nice if they’d used a Farrow & Ball cream rather than orange for the bed, the shower room, the ceiling ..? And wherever there’s that dreaded colour, there’s always the EasyCruise.com logo — in the shower, by the toilet, on the headboard. The headboard, for God’s sake.

Let’s just assume you were here with a loved one, and — another assumption, but there really isn’t much else to do in 10 square metres — you decided to make love in your windowless cabin. You would have the words EasyCruise.com glaring you in the face throughout. Which might make it less of an easy cruise.

I’M NOT here with my loved one. She refused to come along for the sneak Sunday Times preview. “It’s not how you’re supposed to do the Riviera,” she sneered. But she’s missing out.

Which gets us on to the good bits. The standard cabin might be orange and claustrophobic, but the fixtures and fittings aren’t noticeably low-cost: trendy glass sink, crisp white sheets, decent shower. And most of the walls are white. When Stelios, clearly proud of his new venture, showed me around the cabins, I must confess I even made a few squawks of admiration at the minimalist style.

“Ah, yes,” he said with a laugh. “People who invented it, such as Schrager, are very clever. It costs less for minimalism.”