How to holiday White Lotus-style: Billionaire Playground reviewed

Spectator

4 days ago

Today's television is notably fond of presenting us with very rich people to both despise and wish we lived like. As well as high-end dramas like Succession and The White Lotus (a programme that's caused a huge rise in bookings for the resorts where its characters' dreadfulness is filmed), there are any number of documentaries in which the bling's the thing. Netflix, for example, has a genre called 'Lavish Reality Lifestyles' that consists of 38 different shows.
In a mildly cunning twist, Billion Dollar Playground makes some of the staff who wait on the wealthy a kind of audience surrogate: mixing enthusiastic wonder at all that money can bring with beady-eyed disdain for the sense of entitlement displayed by those it brings it to.
The staff in question work for an Australian company that specialises in providing large houses and servants for people wanting a break from their everyday lives of large houses and servants. In this week's two episodes, the setting was an undeniably luxurious villa in Sydney, where the fawning over the guests began before the guests arrived.
First, head concierge Salvatore oversaw the preparation of the house, taking a particularly stern line on slightly misaligned dining chairs. The staff then took advance delivery of the luggage, which the guests, naturally, had neither packed nor were going to unpack themselves. In their defence, mind you, there was a lot of it. The seven women who'd hired the villa (aka 'the ladies') each had ten dresses and 12 pairs of shoes for their two-day stay.
Meanwhile, another thing being got ready was the suspiciously neat soap-opera subplot: an inter-concierge power struggle between Salvatore and his two assistants – the sassy Heaven, who didn't like it when her boss was bossy, and goody-goody Jasmin whose distaste for Heaven's 'lack of respect' led to much mutual glaring.
Eventually the ladies showed up and soon got down to what was required of them, objecting to caviar being served with salmon and complaining that a towel was 'too smooth'. Now all we needed was a spot of jeopardy, which the programme did its breathless best to inject. Would Heaven get the ladies on time to Sydney's Luna theme park which had been laid aside for their exclusive use as a dessert venue? Would she be able to meet their sudden demand for a fire-dancer and seven belly-dancing skirts? (For the record, the answers were 'yes' and 'yes'.)
So what precisely is the point of Billion Dollar Playground? As ever, Heaven came to the rescue by supplying the answer. For all the contrived plotting, the programme's main job is clearly to have the same effect on us as her job has on Heaven. 'I love being able to live vicariously through the guests!' she declared, representing the audience once again.
The Trouble with Mr Doodle was a curious tale, efficiently, if somewhat incuriously, told. As a boy, Sam Cox would spend 15 hours a day drawing. As a young man, he adopted the persona of Mr Doodle for Instagram videos of himself in increasingly spectacular doodling action. He also created an entire mythology of Mr Doodle's struggle to create 'Doodleworld' on earth.
His admittedly pretty nifty scribbles were then spotted by a Hong Kong art dealer and his large-scale works began selling for up to a million dollars. The money allowed him to realise his life-long dream of buying a mansion and having it stripped out and painted white so that he could cover every square inch inside and out with, as you might imagine, doodles.
Understandably, this already seemed to his parents and unexpected girlfriend Alena (all of whom appeared here, along with the man himself) a touch monomaniacal. But it turned into full-blown psychosis in 2022 when Sam Cox disappeared and a hallucinating Mr D. took over completely. Sectioned under the Mental Health Act, he was put in a cell where, deprived of drawing equipment, he doodled on the walls with tomato soup.
At this stage, a happy ending didn't seem likely. Yet that's what the programme now brought us. Having slowly got better, Sam toyed with killing off Mr Doodle but, realising he couldn't live without him, returned to finish decorating the house and to marry the preternaturally patient Alena. After explaining his 'psychotic episode' online, he also received much restorative sympathy from his Instagram followers.
Of course, you could see why the programme chose to take everybody's word that Sam/Mr Doodle is fully recovered, if only out of good manners. Nonetheless, the decision to do so meant that several questions were left unanswered – and indeed unasked. Doesn't Alena find their (let's just say) odd-looking home a little oppressive? Has Sam Cox genuinely made his peace with Mr Doodle – and, if so, how? Above all, are the programme-makers really so sure that everything's now fine?