Television has exploited the housing market to turn us all into greedy voyeurs
0 nly television, with its immense resources of eager young creativity, manpower, money and technology, could take the economic phenomenon of a sustained property boom and transform it into a spectator sport. It is a trick pulled off with such gusto that property programmes of one kind or another cover the schedules like a plague of boils. The list includes Big Strong Boys, Escape to the Country, Housecall, To Buy or Not to Buy, Trading Up, Grand Designs, Home From Home, Relocation Relocation, Other People's Houses, Property Ladder and Selling Houses. More are promised. They form part of what the TV companies call their 'lifestyle genre'. (Lifestyle: a condition to which those with little in the way of either life or style aspire.)
There is something for everyone in the property programmes. We, the viewers, can satisfy our morbid curiosity to peep into other people's homes, find out about their finances, mock their pretensions, and delight in their mishaps; the participants can satisfy their craving to be on television far more easily than via the route taken by some others (dragging your own weight by sled to the North Pole or pushing a wheelbarrow across the Sahara) while getting free advice and help in making a quick killing or finding a new home; the presenters can prattle and pose and affect expertise; and the TV companies can fill the yawning schedules.
The ever-growing bubble of property programming has split like an amoeba from the ever-growing bubble of property prices. With the demand for housing exceeding the supply, Britain is experiencing the most prolonged property boom since the second world war. Over the last year or so, the average house has risen in value by about £20,000. Since average earnings are about £25,000 a year, it is not surprising that many people have come to see property investment as money for nothing, and that television, with its unique ability to reflect baser human emotions, is feeding the illusion. In doing so, it tells us things about ourselves that we would rather not know, i.e., that all of us, with a few honourable exceptions, privately exult in the knowledge that our homes are worth much more than we paid for them and that we have done not a thing to earn that money. We may shed a conspicuous and solitary tear for all those poor first-time buyers who cannot get a foot on the bottom rung of what we have learnt to call the property ladder, but in the privacy of our own wealth-bestowing four walls, greed gets the better of us and we secretly hug ourselves with delight.
Watching others less inhibited than ourselves flaunting their greed on the box makes us feel less guilty and in a way rather superior. After all, there's not much to this property game and surely people cannot be as dumb as they appear. Channel 4's Kirstie Allsopp, now appearing in Relocation Relocation, is fast earning herself a name as the queen of the property experts. And yet her expertise seems to consist in the blindingly obvious. She surveys a damp patch on an interior wall and warns that it might have something to do with unwanted water. She points to the high ceiling in a flat that she is about to recommend to her client, Neil, and comments, 'He's a big lad, he'll like that.' We quickly get used to the jargon of quids and grands, which are the standard measurements of property prices, and of crash pads, kerb appeal, and grab factors. We are, of course, already familiar with the old favourite, 'bags of potential', and we quickly learn that bungalows are great for development because they have lots of loft space and are favoured by old people with plenty of disposable dosh.
Sarah Beeny's programme, Property Ladder, is especially enjoyable because we see amateur property developers in the raw. We see their little faces light up with that blend of greed and gullibility that is the mark of an innocent caught in the glare of easy money. We watch as Sarah counsels them to avoid mistakes such as overspending; we sigh with disbelief as they ignore her advice; we shake our heads when the lurnpen builders fail to turn up, or botch the job; and at last we learn with relief that, despite all, they have still made a killing because prices have inexorably risen, their blunders notwithstanding.
The connoisseur's property programme is Channel Five's House Doctor. Its star is an icy American blonde called Ann Maurice whose speciality is to prepare people's homes for sale. Her technique is to survey the blend of appalling taste and clutter that affronts her disbelieving eye, to offer faint praise through a plastic grin, and then to set about removing from the home all traces of human habitation save neutrally coloured walls, and furnishings hired for the purpose. It always works. Prospective buyers return to the transformed property and, agape, bestow upon it the ultimate praise — fantastic, amazing, fabulous. Ann affects a self-deprecating plastic smile. Another decor, another dollar. Sadder are the programmes that feature people whose dissatisfaction with their lot is so great that they seek solace in dreams — dream homes, dream kitchens, dream views across sun-dappled valleys, dream escapes to foreign lands where there are no cares and there is always honey for tea. We who sit at home and watch know better. So it is with no surprise, but just a knowing nod, that we see their dreams disintegrate before our eyes. Time to douse the box, switch off the lights, and go to bed.
But there is hope. Hope that the growing gap between earnings and house prices, and the prospect of continuing rises in interest rates will combine to take the heat out of the property boom and restore the market to something resembling normality. Hope that we will abandon the notion of rising to riches on the stepping stones of our dead homes and rediscover the simple pleasure of buying and owning a house, not for profit, but to live in, to enjoy and, from time to time, to repair and maintain with a cheerful grumble. That, of course, would oblige the eager young creative minds of television to look elsewhere for their sport, but their loss would be a small price to pay for relief from the spectacle of our fellow man exhibiting for all to see the vanity and delusion that lurks within us.
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