15 Best British TV Shows Of The Decade
12. Four In A Bed
Four In A Bed is a comedy of manners in the classic sense. Four hoteliers take it in turns to spend the night in one another’s establishments, examine them from top to bottom, and pay what they think the place is worth. What sounds like an exercise in gentile hospitality quickly turns to outright war as sleights real and imagined lead to some of the most tense and vicious arguments on television.
Like its predecessor and inspiration Come Dine With Me, Four In A Bed gets mileage from the difference to what we say about others behind their backs compared with when we’re face to face. John from Devon may claim his breakfast was perfectly enjoyable, but get him on his own and he’s got some things to say about the yolk of his poached egg.
Where Four In A Bed has the edge, though, is in its showdowns at the end of each week. The guests fill out a survey on each location, and must then back up what they’ve written while looking their subject in the eye. Sparks, invariably, fly. It is a mystery why anyone agrees to go on Four In A Bed: there’s the publicity element, sure, but the risk of making yourself look a prize fool seems far too great.
But they continue to go on, and we can only salute them for it. It takes a special type of person to tear a hotel room apart on a hunt for dirt, to completely strip a bed so as to take exception to a minor stain on a mattress. Most of us wouldn’t drop to our hands and knees in a guesthouse bathroom in a separate search for discolouration around the otherwise-pristine toilet. And that’s why most of us aren’t built for Four In A Bed.