The Property Ladder Scam

In the beginning there was Changing Rooms. And Changing Rooms begat The House Doctor and the House Doctor begat both Location, Location, Location and Property Ladder, which in turn begat Grand Designs and DIY SOS and whilst all this was going on Changing Rooms spawned Home Front and some of the others produced bastard offspring like Relocation, Relocation, Relocation, A Place In The Country and a whole host of very similar yet subtly different television shows.

Across these televisual generations, a subtle shift took place, from Changing Rooms to Home Front to Property Ladder. Changing Rooms – apart from introducing the nation to the luxuriantly hyphenated Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen and Anna Ryder-Richardson – was all about sending designers into other people’s houses and giving them a swift lick of paint, a light dosing of wallpaper and even some less uncoordinated furniture. (Americans have their own version of this, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition , fronted by Ty Pennington, a man so hyperactive there isn’t enough Ritalin in the world to make me allow him into my home.)

Home Front paired LL-B with the Irish landscape designer Diarmuid Gavin and let the pair of them loose on slightly larger houses with slightly larger budgets and, as the series went on, slightly larger egos. The sight of Llewelyn-Bowen being almost reduced to tears by a woman who he had already reduced to tears with his design was a sight to behold.

I have already written about Property Ladder once this month and I make no apologies for doing so again, as people doing houses up themselves was merely the logical extension of people having designers do their houses up.

Even more subtly, the producers of these shows found a way to save money. In Changing Rooms, the designers each had £500 with which to do a legendarily shoddy job on redoing one room of a house. In Home Front, the budget ran to thousands, but the work was one a grander scale and took much longer. And on Changing Rooms, the budget is simply…nonexistent. Yes, it is one thing to stand back, have your house invaded by film crew and workmen, yet know that the BBC are paying for it, but it takes a special degree of desperation to allow yourself to be filmed spending your own money.

Admittedly, this might be the closest that some people get to being Victoria Beckham, but I doff my cap to whichever genius realised just how cheaply you could make television when given enough property owning nitwits desperate for their time in the spotlight.