How I See It

Forget Bitcoin – the best investing tips on TV can be found in ‘Gentleman Jack’

What a terrible time to have money. My heart goes out to the super-rich. Or even just the normal rich. Like holding a cup of tea aboard a boat on the Bay of Biscay, there’s nowhere safe to put it.

In the bank? It loses value daily! Mars bars will be £100 by Thursday!

Stocks and shares? All plunged to worthlessness. If you’ve got a pension pot, don’t look at it. That intensity of glaring red might take your corneas out, like staring at a dying sun.

A few months ago, I asked a knowledgeable financier for tips on investing in the stock market – having had a dabble myself, to ill effect – and he told me that a great way to get rich is: when prices tumble, buy more. I believe he’s now sweeping the streets of King’s Cross and living on cat food.

Bitcoin? Is that the way? So everyone would have you believe just a few weeks ago. All people talked about was the importance, during global uncertainty, of transferring one’s life savings into this whole new form of currency, free from the tricksy machinations of government. I was worried that I didn’t understand how crypto worked, so I looked it up. I learned that transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a publicly distributed ledger called a blockchain. If anything, that made it less clear.

I discussed this on my radio show Heresy, which returned to Radio 4 last week after a threeyear hiatus (following a joke that so irritated Nigel Farage, he demanded a police investigation. Police! Truly there are no libertarians left; you might just as well look for a dodo.) Anyway, Heresy is finally back in the 6.30pm comedy slot on Wednesdays – for six weeks – but its broadcast was further delayed because one of our guests was in another show, on a different day, for one of the weeks. This breaks a bizarre BBC radio rule: no comedian can appear at 6.30pm twice in the same week.

Never mind that we now live in a digital, podcast world where audiences do all their own scheduling anyway. The BBC boffins would sooner hold a whole series back for months than risk Margery from Tunbridge Wells tuning her dial carefully to

FM92 and hearing somebody she heard two days ago. (Even though this theoretical Margery is such a slavish comedy fan she never misses the slot, she still CAN’T BEAR to hear Miles Jupp twice in the same week.)

In this case, Margery needed to be protected from David Mitchell. One of my particular favourites. I considered it quite the coup when he agreed to be a guest – very few presenter-producers can play the trump card of persuading a big comedy name that he owes them a favour because he forgot to put the bins out – so I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. But, because he was in another show on a different day, the powersthat-be snatched away Heresy’s promised broadcast slot and shoved it two months later into the year.

So, the crypto-boom episode which was so fresh and zeitgeisty when we recorded it (February) will now be broadcast on June 29. Ah well. Perhaps Bitcoin will have bounced back by then! Or hyperinflation will have kicked in so hard that nobody’s listening anyway, and we’re all just huddled in the forest singing folk songs! I can only hope.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that cryptocurrency has also collapsed. Good luck with your non-fungible tokens; perhaps you can weave them into a blanket when the heating runs out.

So that only leaves one option for your speculative investor: property. I was thinking about this as I watched two very different takes on the property business, series two of Gentleman Jack on iPlayer and Stath Lets Flats on All 4 (which I never saw when it stormed the world in 2018, a mistake that I started rectifying two weeks ago when its co-creator and star Jamie Demetriou won yet another Bafta). Ha! See how I watch everything at a time of my own choosing, Radio 4!

I love Suranne Jones as Anne Lister, her stompy walk and little glances moving the story onward like songs in a musical. Scenes between her, Gemma Whelan and Rosie Cavaliero are an absolute champagne breakfast of sparkling collaboration.

Lister was a classic Tory speculator, a sort of 19th-century Thatcherite entrepreneur (except gay, which Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have liked because Thatcher wasn’t a proper libertarian either), and series two is doing a great job of bringing out that side of her. It’s less about the romance of Lister’s affair with Ann Walker, more about the frustration of trying to merge their two estates so Lister’s fledgling property business can be leveraged into an empire. I love all that sort of thing. It’s like those Jane Austen stories about marrying big houses, except Anne Lister is both hopeful spinster

AND grumpy bridegroom.

Meanwhile, in Stath Lets Flats, Demetriou gives an irresistible performance as a useless modern estate agent trying to market a series of really awful bedsits. I can’t get enough of this show, I am so glad I’ve finally got stuck in.

Two hundred years separate these two worlds, yet the message is the same: quids in if you’re the landlord, nightmare if you’re the tenant. The UK urgently needs a property crash at the moment, but I doubt we’re going to get one. So if you do have money, that’s where I’d advise you to put it.

And if you haven’t… unlucky.

Series two is less about romance than it is about building a property empire