Don’t waste four hours of your life on this nonsense
Netflix has been trying to find the next Tiger King ever since Tiger King became an insanely big hit. In Gunther’s Millions, they think they’ve cracked it: a couldn’t-makeit-up tale of eccentricity, sleaze, unreliable narrators and animals. In this case, a German Shepherd called Gunther, who was apparently left $400 million by his owner, a German countess called Karlotta Liebenstein, and lives the high life.
You can see why it got the green light. It’s absurd – here’s Gunther on a yacht, and on a private plane, buying Madonna’s house in Miami and being served steak covered in gold leaf by a private chef. As with Tiger King, darker stories are gradually revealed. At the centre of it all is Gunther’s “caretaker”, a deeply weird man named Maurizio Mian who hires a bunch of hot young models to be a pretend pop group, although actually he wants them to take part in orgies for a science experiment about the route to happiness. It’s all quite mad.
But here’s a spoiler so you don’t have to waste four hours of your life on this: they did make it up. There was no German countess. Mian and his mother invented the story as a cover for their tax dealings in Liechtenstein. And there is a whole line of Gunthers – this one is Gunther VI.
If the documentary had uncovered this and confronted the culprits with bombshell new evidence, it might have been worthwhile. But the film-maker, Aurelien Leturgie, knows from the off that Gunther’s backstory is a lie. Worse, so do most of the contributors. Until this is revealed, they’re taking us for mugs. The most disingenuous performance is from a woman called Lucy Clarkson, who introduces herself as “head of PR for Gunther”. In fact, she’s a former tabloid fixture from Rotherham who has somehow become involved in this, and she’ll happily go along with the “world’s richest dog” nonsense if it gets her into a major Netflix show.
It’s not just Clarkson. Everyone involved can barely keep the smirks off their faces (with the exception of Mian, who is just too strange to be doing this purely for laughs). At least Lee Dahlberg, hired as one of the pop stars and now Gunther’s “spokesperson”, is honest about milking the opportunities: “I wanted to be a tick on that dog’s ass for the rest of my life.”
Gunther was always used for a series of publicity stunts – the Madonna mansion, the purchase of an Italian football team and installation of a porn star as its president. The makers of this documentary are simply facilitating another one.
‘People come to me because my houses are the best f---ing houses, basically… They know it’s going to be a big f--- off house.” Meet Guy Phoenix, star of Building Britain’s Superhomes (Channel 4). Phoenix does indeed build very large houses, of the kind favoured by footballers: shiny surfaces, cavernous spaces, champagne rooms, you know the sort of thing. If your idea of cosy living is a terminal at Dubai Airport, Phoenix could be the property developer for you.
As long as you don’t mind relinquishing control, that is. Phoenix prides himself on being “possibly the only developer in the world who builds houses of this value without a full set of plans. I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to look like, I can’t tell you how much it’s going to cost, but I do tell you it will be f---ing fabulous”. Have you noticed that he swears a lot? It seems to be his calling card. I suppose it worked for Gordon Ramsay. The makers of the show appear to think he’s a great character. Perhaps his clients do too. “Do you want the good news or the good f---ing news?” he demanded from a chap who had come to check on the progress of his house in Nottingham. The owner suggested a couple of ideas of his own; Phoenix was not having it. “This is why I don’t allow f---ing customers to come to f---ing houses!”
The show made some half-hearted efforts to inject some jeopardy into the building of Phoenix’s latest project – they installed some big windows, which is always a high stakes moment in Grand Designs – but really this two-part programme is just an advert for Phoenix’s business. He took us to his home in the south of France
(it comes with a housekeeper so capable that “he can fire a f---ing space shuttle”), mentioning that it is available for rent. He gave us an extensive tour of the multi-million pound house he built as “a little bit of Monaco in the East Midlands” which has “135 places to sit”, wallpaper at £300-per-roll and a helicopter pad. Like its builder, it was somewhat charmless.