Julie Walters narrates the migration of Rob Temple’s Twitter feed to television, where twenty-odd famous Britons sit in pastel lounges and confess their terror of shop assistants, their hatred of phone calls, their codependent relationship with the word "sorry". Each 45-minute episode strings together talking heads, archive clips and animated tweets, the guests competing to out-mortify one another: Aisling Bea recalls pretending to be deaf to avoid small talk on trains; another panellist admits rehearsing takeaway orders like a hostage negotiator.
Channel 4 commissioned two short runs, seven episodes total, between August 2015 and May 2016, plus a Christmas special heavy on awkward office-party anecdotes. Ratings were modest but steady, hovering around a million, enough to shift another 60,000 copies of Temple’s spin-off books and a warehouse of mugs labelled "Oh, lovely, thanks". The tone is affectionate anthropology rather than satire, the show treating embarrassment as a national trait on par with talking about the weather.
Production values stay deliberately low-key, directors trusting the panel’s comic timing rather than stunts. The format expired quietly after the second series; repeats still surface on 4OD, usually labelled "comfort viewing". Very British Problems survives mainly as a social-media feed, its televised incarnation now a footnote in the long march of British comedians monetising their anxieties.
Production Details
Channel 4 / 2 Seasons / 7 Episodes / 2015
Main Cast
Julie Walters as Narrator (voice)
Aisling Bea as Self
