No more property porn please

Ex-Brookside pin-up Simon Oâ™Brien now presents C4â™s Up Your Street
The Weekender

Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for exclusive competitions, offers and theatre ticket deals

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

I am a great lover of animals. Roasted, grilled, fried or raw, they're delicious, and we're obviously meant to eat them, otherwise why would they be made of meat?

I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to become a fruitarian, although I've never understood the delight that some people seem to take in blowing small holes through large mammals, not so they can consume them, but simply so they can decapitate them and display their severed heads.

As a child, when I first saw a moose's head mounted on a wall, I assumed that the beast must have been chased by men on horses and had accidentally smashed through the bricks at high speed (its horns drilling right through the plaster), and that this was what people meant when they spoke of "cowboys" involved in "knocking through".

To this day, I still check the exterior of any house that has one, half expecting to see the rest of the carcass dangling there.

There was plenty of knocking through on yesterday afternoon's Up Your Street (C4), and I even spotted the heads of one or two mooses, or is it meese (like goose and geese)?

Simon O'Brien would doubtless be able to solve that lexicographical conundrum, because the former Brookside teenager with his scallyfromthe-alley Scouse patois has now transmogrified into a greying property show presenter, who confidently expresses himself in an extraordinarily grandiloquent vocabulary (whether he understands what he's saying is another matter).

"Oh, the expectancy, the expectancy," he declared as he introduced his tedious show, in which "we take neighbours into each other's seemingly identical houses and compare their styles and find out whose is worth the most." If this format was a blueprint for a house, it would surely never get planning permission.

Yesterday's edition came from the dismal city of Sheffield where, for kicks, youths watch the traffic lights change colour (although it's a great place to buy a house, because if it gets repossessed, you won't mind).

O'Brien homed in on two comparatively exclusive Victorian properties in Peel Terrace, but before letting the owners view each other's back passages and beyond, he took the opportunity to rhapsodise verbally in private, with only the camera for company.

"Palatial, very grandiose," he began, gushing ecstatically over the "fantastic quarter-turn staircase with gorgeous ornate brackets", and later becoming positively orgasmic as he fondled the "exquisite" stair rods. For his sake, I hope he never makes the same mistake I once did, of confusing a stair rod with a steroid. I couldn't sit down for a month afterwards.

After more ecstatic agent-speak about "a knock-through kitchen/ diner" and "a false fireplace", Sharon and Jerry were finally allowed to view Maggie's house (which they'd doubtless been invited into many times before anyway), and vice versa.

Then came the sole true purpose of the programme, as O'Brien sat them down together, asked them "Whose house do you think is worth the most?" then announced, "I am now happy to value your house."

However, the crass way in which he estimated the market resale prices of the two houses suggested that he didn't really value them at all, he merely knew how much they might cost at the moment of recording; and although the owners duly smiled when told they could make a financial profit if they sold the places they lived in, I wondered why it was assumed that they would want to, and also how many more of these money-fixated property shows the schedules can take.

Not many more, I suspect, because a house-price collapse is just around the corner, and when owners start discovering that their bricks and mortar are worth less than their mortgage, what will happen to our property obsession then?

Maverick Television may claim to be "originating genuinely fresh ideas across all genres", but everything about this programme seemed stale and derivative. From the uninspired title sequence to the soulless preoccupation with money, this is simply a form of mutual masturbation for property owners.

Let's hope that C4's new director of programmes, Kevin Lygo, will start zazzing up the daytime schedule, and in particular finds something better to screen between 4pm-5pm each day than two consecutive real estate shows (A Place in the Sun being the other offender).

Frankly, I've never understood why the British (unlike the continentals) think it's so demeaning not to own your own house, and my advice to anyone would be to rent your property whenever possible, thereby avoiding a lifetime of continually painting and repainting in a frantic bid to increase the value of your pile, the strain of which will ultimately bring on a massive and fatal heart attack.

And because you were always so busy with the DIY, you'll probably have forgotten to write your will, so you'll die intestate, and your house will go to a distant and feckless relative who, within days of your demise, will sell the property, and blow the lot on whores, booze and bags of nose candy, and then put anything left over on a three-legged donkey at Ascot.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT