Tuesday 8 May 2007 10:00pm - 10:30pm on ITV1.

Nightmare Nannies - Confessions meets the home helps who dish the dirty on what goes on behind closed doors. Our home is our castle but what do the cleaners and nannies get up to once the kids are asleep and the hovering is done?

Be careful who you let in to look after your kids, as before long they could have gained control of a little too much. The rich and famous have had very public affairs and disputes with their nannies, but it can happen to anyone as one woman found to her cost when her husband proposed to her nanny.

Celebrity mum Lowri Turner said: “You don’t want to hire Svetlana from Russia who’s a part time glamour model do you?!”

It’s not just marriages they can wreck, the weekly household budget can come under attack. One enterprising nanny didn’t even bother lying about the kitty she was left by her employee. She spent half the emergency money on champagne, and dutiful handed over the receipts to her boss.

Another nanny Jessie confesses that “the children weren’t my priority, the social life was my priority”, and nanny Katya Livaditis tells the story of how she accidentally fed her children and employer cat food mince in a bolognese.

Nanny Steph King reveals how nannies ‘bribe’ their charges to tell their mum they were eating healthy food.

“When they were at work I used to just give the children fish fingers and pasta, and they ate it and they loved it so I just carried that on,” says Steph. “But they were bribed to tell mum they’d had other stuff for tea.”

And you can bet that if anything in the home gets broken, the kids will get the blame, even if it was the nanny.

A word of advice from child care expert Georgina Walsh if you’re deciding to employ someone to help take care of you kids is think carefully.

“One of the key things to remember when thinking about your children and a nanny or au pair, is that the nanny or au pair is thinking about today or this week, and you’ve got your children’s whole lives to think about,” says Georgina.

It’s not only the nannies who abuse their positions, cleaners reveal the short cuts and cover ups the use to make it look like they’ve done an excellent job. The main rule is the best effect in the least possible time. Some short cuts are so short they don’t involve any cleaning at all!

Cleaner Kay Bishton gives one example of a cleaning short cut.

“One example of laziness is people using sticky tape to get rid of unwanted body hairs from beds so they don’t have to change the sheets which is just disgusting!” she says.

“Another good one was putting air freshener on the light bulbs,” says Kay “because when they heat up you can smell the air freshener, so when people walked in to the room it appeared to be cleaned.”