I think we can all agree that, over the past 25 years or so, Channel 4 has been the market leader when it comes to property television. Come on, just admit it. Do you really want to do this? Do you want to bring up DIY SOS, again? Do you want to fight with me over the magician-glam of Homes Under the Hammer’s Martin Roberts? You do not. The best property TV in this country has consistently revolved round the holy trinity of McCloud, Allsopp and Spencer, and is always best when showing wide-eyed middle-class cash buyers pour concrete in such a way that their marriage nearly ends. So it is, so it always was.
What has messed with this system is “the real world”, which, if you’ve dabbled anywhere near the property market in the last few years, you will know is very bad. It is close to impossible for a generation of young people to even buy a starter home. That ripple effect is working itself up the age and income brackets. It affects rents and postcodes and how close communities can be. Property TV has to adapt to a world where the idea of even owning property is now absurdly aspirational. As a result, the teatimely hour-longs need to lower their sights from “This is a showstopper foyer!” to “Yeah maybe that bit under the stairs could be a bedroom”. And so: Worst House on the Street (Tuesday, 8pm, Channel 4).
WHOTS is fronted by brother-sister developer duo Scarlette and Stuart Douglas, who are quite good but also sometimes speak to each other as if they’ve just met in a queue. You might remember them from helping prop up George Clarke’s Flipping Fast, a sort of yassified Homes Under the Hammer from earlier this year that I found quite ghoulish: six teams were handed £100k and given a year to make profit on as many properties as possible. Absolutely all of them were idiot amateurs, and not one of them failed to make money (one team bought a house, spent three months painting every room white, then sold for a £19k profit: that seems very normal and good!).
I am not saying property TV needs to make moral judgments on the state of the market (“Just tidying up this garden makes the property worth £20,000 more. That’s actually really bad, by the way”), but it did always feel as if it was tiptoeing round a large, honking elephant in the room. Property TV has to adapt to reflect a market that has been irreparably damaged by property TV.
Anyway, Worst House on the Street, the concept of which is … well, um. It’s actually quite hard to tell. Nominally, it’s about people buying a bad house and renovating it into a good one. This week we meet a cheerful young couple, Harry and Yimika, and interview their neighbours about the house they’ve just bought, which is apparently an eyesore (neighbours complaining about a house whose visual aesthetic might drag down the value of their own property is arguably peak “British TV”) – and occasionally Stuart and Scarlette pop in and offer vague advice. “Buy a kitchen counter straight from the supplier instead of a showroom” is about 10 minutes of this episode. Thank you, experts. Never would have thought of that.
But, crucially, no one on WHOTS seems to know what it is. Harry and Yimika are constantly saying this is their first home, that they’ve sacrificed so much to buy it and they want to turn it into a dream family property, and Stuart and Scarlette are constantly talking about how much value they are adding. Scarlette is particularly obsessed with saying a very minor change has added 5% – apparently changing the bathroom taps and tiles did just that, which (and yes I am petty enough to do the maths) equated to £20,000. We are constantly being told that the couple’s renovation budget is “only” £40,000.
And then there’s some contradictory advice: Harry and Yimika are dead-set on taking the chimney breasts out of four rooms, which would create more livable space for them, but are sternly talked out of it. Instead, they spend the same amount on a porch to add “kerb appeal”, and later we see them tiptoe-squeeze between the end of their bed and the jutting-out chimney breast. You really have to think: have they made this house nice for themselves to live in, or slightly nicer for the next person to buy? Nobody ever seems to know who they’re doing it for. So maybe, actually, this is the TV that most accurately reflects the state of the market as it is now. No notes.
