TV One Uses Staff to Beat the Rich

TV One is following up Inside Tatler and Posh Pawn with another HD take on how tough it is to be rich in the UK.

You Can’t Get the Staff, which will air 9.30 Thursdays from May 26, goes behind the doors of some of Britain’s poshest homes to see how the cream of society handle their domestic staff.

Critics were very sniffy about the 2014 series but the premiere was popular enough to serve up an above-average viewership of 1.6 million for Channel 4.

Said The Independent: “If any TV show was inviting us to point and laugh last night it was You Can’t Get The Staff, a new five-part series on Channel 4 which follows a few anachronistic aristocrats as they attempt to hire servants for their crumbling country piles.”

“Being a Channel 4 programme, it zoomed in unnecessarily on the odd rolled eye and ghastly comment when there were far more interesting things going on, far more interesting people revealing their unique lives,” the Daily Express argued.

The Telegraph quipped the opening episode “resembled one long compilation of ‘comedy’ moments from Downton.

“In other words, the activities of an assortment of bumbling gentry and long-suffering staff were put to a soundtrack of plucked strings, with results that were mildly entertaining but hardly hilarious …

“The snarky voiceover, with its ready indulgence of screamingly obvious puns and wordplay, obscured what could have been a far more insightful documentary.”

Concurred The Times: “This series set out to find the relics of Downton Abbey society but ended up as a tame bit of nothing.”