We have been watching "Manor House," a PBS (originally BBC) television program in which typical, modern-day British people live for three months in a 1905-ish country mansion. One group, a family, becomes the wealthy landowners, and the other group has volunteered to become their domestic servants.

This is fascinating because, as one would suspect, the "wealthy" family is settling nicely into its role of being waited upon hand and foot, while chaos reigns below stairs, where the duties and rigid hierarchy are so grating that everyone is miserable and two scullery maids have quit (so far: we have only seen the first episode). The handsome first footman suspects that people in Edwardian times were somehow tougher--by which, one presumes, he means the servants, since the wealthy appear to have been so completely helpless that the could not even button their own shirts. I am not sure that people in service a hundred years ago were sturdier; perhaps they were simply not offered the choice of walking off a television program back into a comparatively cushy existence. They had to do their jobs or they starved.

In the twenty-first century, I am not comfortable with the idea of servants. When I lived in a Chicago high-rise a few years ago, I used to enter and exit the building through the back because having the doorman open the door for me was distressing. Even now, as much as I love having someone clean my apartment for me, it embarrasses me to give Ibo instructions. I suppose, like the wealthy family on "Manor House," I could get used to it.

It would be better than having to empty the chamber pots myself.