Forget boring billionaires. I want to see more of Eamonn and Ruth

Mrs THATCHER’s favourite philandering MP, the shameless alan clark, once dismissed nouveau riche Michael heseltine as a man who ‘had to buy his own furniture’.

For most of us, the reality is far worse. We’re the ‘ never riche’ and we got our furniture at Ikea — which means we had to build it ourselves.

Billionaires have their own branch of Ikea, where the flat-packs are pre-assembled and studded with jewels. Because they’re super-rich, this megastore isn’t a warehouse outside harlow, essex, but an annual fair called Masterpiece, held at the royal hospital in chelsea.

ruth Langsford and hubbie eamonn holmes blagged their way up Masterpiece’s red carpet and into its glittering salesrooms on

How The Other Half Lives (c5). They then promptly disgraced themselves by demanding to know the price of everything, like urchins ogling the cream fancies in a patisserie: ‘cor, mister, how much is that one?’

The more embarrassment they caused, the more fun they had. a brocaded armchair (‘Nice for watching telly,’ said eamonn) cost £72,000, a bespoke piano was £1.85 million and there was no price tag on a pair of gem-heavy earrings.

‘£100?’ guessed eamonn. ‘£1,000? stop me when I’m getting close.’ When they reached £2 million, the exasperated salesman made them turn off the cameras.

The couple have been presenting everything from chat shows to quiz games lately. They have the same his ’ n’ hers dynamic as richard and Judy: she’s sensible and longsuffering, he’s puppyish and camera-hungry.

When they’re together, they can make irresistible TV, because they relish each other’s company and share a sense of mischief. They’re having fun, and that makes the viewer want to join in.

The best sequence had them squealing like teenagers in the back of a limo while a former police instructor showed them high-speed manoeuvres to evade kidnappers.

But too often in this hour-long documentary — the first of three investigating why London has a higher concentration of the ultrawealthy than any city on earth — ruth and eamonn went in separate directions. and when that happens they’re just ordinary presenters: their unique appeal is squandered.

ruth went shopping with a couple of Nigerian wedding planners, while eamonn flew off to russia with a property oligarch.

This told us nothing about London’s status as a billionaire’s playground: it simply looked as though eamonn had got a better offer, eager to take a ride on a private jet and explore a trillionaire’s village in the Ukraine where every house has a swimming pool the size of a boating lake.

every now and then, eamonn urged viewers to enter a competition to win ‘ a luxury spa weekend’. he’s never really lost his GMTV phone-in instincts.

sharon horgan and rob Delaney returned as a married couple in

Catastrophe (c4), a scabrous sitcom that has a rich seam of observation beneath its quickfire, foul-mouthed one-liners.

a word of warning: this marital comedy is not Terry and June. It is quite possibly the rudest, most sexually explicit sitcom ever shown on television. But it is also touchingly truthful about married life for new parents.

The first series took sharon and rob from a one-night stand to the altar. The next picks up the story a couple of years on, when they’ve got a toddler and a newborn.

every besotted couple swears they won’t let babies change their relationship, because no one can ever envisage the cataclysmic scale of parenthood.

We call our kids ‘little monsters’, but the fact is that sometimes they make monsters of us.

‘Of course I love my babies more than you, I’m not a sociopath!’ shrieks an exhausted sharon at her husband, before struggling to change her week-old daughter’s sodden babygro, in the dark, at three in the morning. Babies take precedence over everything.

This is comedy for anyone whose life has been turned inside out by a demanding, bawling, selfish infant. I mean a baby, of course — not eamonn holmes.

FACE OF THE WEEK: Even if you’re not interested in crime drama, give River (BBC1) a watch just to see the extraordinarily expressive features of its star, Stellan Skarsgard. He can telegraph his thoughts with just a twitch of his mouth more clearly than speaking them. A dazzling actor.