Slum’stheword
Former showbiz reporter Martel Maxwell tells how she braved derelict flats for Homes Under The Hammer.. while eight months pregnant
WHAT do you need when you have two boys under three and are about to give birth to their new brother?
For most of us, it’s a live-in nanny and a month in a spa. For Martel Maxwell, it’s a new job.
The new face of BBC’s Homes Under The Hammer got the gig and started filming just before Guthrie, now six months, was born. She replaced Lucy Alexander, one of the original hosts from 2003. So no pressure there.
“They asked me to screen test,” Dundonian Martel, 40, said. “I hear so many women saying the opportunities aren’t there, that they stop progressing at work. And I was about to have all these children.
“I told them, I’m not the safest bet, I’m not single, I can’t just drop things. I don’t live in the middle of London. I live in the middle of fields.”
Undeterred, they gave her the job. Filming continued around Guthrie’s arrival before Christmas and the results are now on screen.
Martel’s first episode of the long-running property show went out in late April.
She gamely hauled her baby bump around a grotty Nottinghamshire bungalow and managed not to gag at the powerful smell of dog that pervaded the house.
Martel’s presenting skills were tested to the max when she had to demonstrate an unusual feature in the property’s bathroom – a hole in the door. She sat on the toilet and pretended to have run out of loo roll so that the director could hand some through the gap.
This kind of humiliation is not the only challenge of filming lifestyle shows.
The shooting schedule is so tight that lunch is a sandwich on the move between locations. Hair and make-up is DIY in the front seat of the car.
And who knows what might be waiting for the crew behind the door of a property that has been repossessed and is being sold at auction?
Martel said: “Foxes might be living there. Cats might be living there.
“The first place we filmed, when I was pregnant, I was wearing little wedges. I wanted to look as good as I could, which is always tough when you’re pregnant anyway. There were fossilised rats on the floor.
“Fossilised rats don’t go that well with wedges. I have now invested in a pair of good boots.”
Filming in derelict buildings and trashed flats in Cardiff, Birmingham and Stoke are a change of pace for Martel, who made her name as a showbiz reporter. But she insists she’s ready to dial down the glamour.
She said: “It’s not the red carpet. But I’ve done showbiz for a long time and tried to broaden it out with shows such as Landward and country stuff.
“I got more civilised jobs – backstage on shows such as Marcella or Grantchester, and covering the red carpet at James Bond.
“But I can’t be the oldest showbiz reporter on the beat. It’s the kind of job that requires you not to have any responsibilities. You have to dedicate your life to partying.
“The people who do it well are out till 3am, and that’s impossible just now.”
Not that Martel is one to take the early bath option.
She said: “Presented with a free bar, I’m not the type to have a Diet Coke. I’m always there until the end. But doing that as a living is not something I could balance with family.”
And if her inner diva ever resurfaces, there are three young men ready to bring her straight back down to earth when she gets home.
She said: “Every time I come through the door, they ask, ‘Got presents, mummy?’
“I asked the older two if they were OK with me going to work. ‘Yes’, they said, ‘Will we get presents?’
“When I point to myself and ask who that is on TV they say, ‘It’s you, mummy’, like I’ve asked the most stupid question in the world.
“Then, with the next breath, ‘Can I have a snack?’ You know your place when you get home.” ● Homes Under the Hammer is on BBC1, weekdays, 10am.