From DIY to flirting about undies, Kirstie and Phil have got it all . . .
The inside of your telly is a small world. There’s nearly 70 million of us watching across Britain, but just a tiny number squeeze their way onto the screen. And once there, the same faces seem to crop up every night across all the channels.
On Tuesday, for instance, Monica Galetti was visiting a modernist hotel made of glass beside Croatia’s gorgeous coast on BBC2 at 8pm, before judging the final of MasterChef: The Professionals on BBC1 an hour later.
As for Monica’s co-presenter, Gregg Wallace, as soon as he polishes off the last plateful tonight he’s off to C5 tomorrow, touring Copenhagen’s Christmas Market.
And it’s easy to name half a dozen others who are ever-present on our screens: Bradley Walsh, Joe Lycett, Gordon Ramsay, Romesh Ranganathan, Ashley Banjo — and, of course, Kirstie Allsopp.
Kirstie’s Christmas crafting show featured on this page yesterday, and she was back a matter of hours later with a new series of Love It Or List It (C4), the property show she co-hosts with Phil Spencer.
The duo made it plain they have no intention of easing back on their TV workload. ‘We probably will be 99 when we finish making this series,’ Phil said.
And they’ll probably still be flirting madly with each other. Last night, Phil inquired about her undies and Kirstie teased him that she might not be wearing any: ‘Leaving the house in a dress, you’re always at risk of having no knickers on.’ (TMI, Kirstie!)
Love It Or List It is a format that could run unchanged for decades. every episode is the same: a couple who have outgrown their home must decide whether to extend and renovate, or simply move somewhere else, while Phil and Kirstie offer conflicting advice.
But every episode is also different, because no two couples are alike.
This time, we met the world’s most stubborn man, a builder in Poole named Roy, and his long-suffering wife Sue. They had been living with a half-finished extension for 20 years.
Roy was adamant that he wasn’t going to move. I suspect Sue didn’t really want to either — this was just her clever way of encouraging her husband to finish those little jobs he’d been putting off since the turn of the millennium. Plumbing the shower in, fitting some doors, those sort of minor details.
This show was devised to blend house-hunting with DIY tips, but the real pleasure is in nosing around other people’s homes and marvelling at the way they live. It’s all very watchable.
It’s also hard to switch off a gripping true-crime documentary. But the ones really worth seeing are those that offer either a new twist on the investigation or an insight into the psychology of murderers.
The Lie: Murder In Suburbia (C5) does neither. This two-parter, concluding tonight, examines the killing of motherof-two Rachel O’Reilly at her home outside Dublin in 2004.The murder was clumsily staged to look like a burglary gone wrong, and police had strong suspicions about Rachel’s husband Joe from the first day.
even viewers who knew nothing of the case will have shared those instincts, from the moment we first heard Joe’s clumsy phone messages to his wife before her body was found.
Rachel’s mother Rose said she realised her son-in-law committed the crime when she heard her daughter’s voice in her head, saying: ‘Mam — it was him.’
Luckily, the police didn’t have to rely on psychic evidence.
It’s a strange story, but this programme adds little to it.