“That’s all it is, the whole time.” At the end of season two, however, Demetriou wrote in a bombshell: Stath learned that the baby his colleague Carole was carrying was in fact his. “My focus is exclusively on making something that feels funny,” says Demetriou. The stakes never feel particularly high because the characters’ priorities are so at odds with the real world.
Though the episodes pursue plots in a comparable way to other sitcoms, the humour feels more sketch-like and more concerned with prioritising the comedy than the story. Many of the people around him also seem to have been hit on the head with something heavy: his sister Sophie, played by real-life sister Natasia, essentially exists in a dream land as does their father Vasos (Christos Stergioglou) and Sophie’s friend, Katia (Ellie White). This is principally because he is exceptionally thick (his attempt to shoo a pigeon out of a flat sees him destroy three televisions he sets fire to a garden). The world through Stath’s eyes is a confusing, chaotic one, and things are always going wrong for him. In fact, so pervasive was The Office‘s influence on Demetriou that he didn’t appreciate the tally of similarities until the end of the first season. Now 33, Demetriou embodies Stath – a Greek-Cypriot lettings agent who works for his father’s London family business, Michael and Eagle Lettings – with a virtuosic, Gervaisian authenticity. With a few exceptions, its characters speak in a gorgeously strange type of English, full of deliciously deranged expressions (“Be soft as you come through the door”) and utter gibberish (“I’d rather take red metal”). The Channel 4 show about an idiotic lettings agent, which Demetriou first began working on in 2013, is a phenomenon that floats around in a category almost entirely of its own. With Demetriou now the award-winning creator, writer and star of an internationally acclaimed sitcom, it is hard to believe that those who turned him down don’t feel foolish for letting him slip through their grasp.īut it would be disingenuous to say that Stath Lets Flats, Demetriou’s baby, was ever an obvious hit. “I thought it was what I wanted to do, because I didn’t really know what options there were,” he tells NME. In his teens, he auditioned for “every drama school” two years in a row and never got a single callback. Jamie Demetriou says that when he was young, he was a rubbish actor.
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