Meet Britain’s next big star – the Basil Fawlty of Belgravia

FROM deposed Hollywood A-listers travelling with a retinue of poodles and their doggy masseurs, to Muskovite oligarchs driving diamond-in laid Rolls- Royces— the most entertaining factual TV of recent months has focused on super-rich eccentrics.

We’ve looked inside Claridge’s, London’s most luxurious hotel, where a suite can cost £7,000 a night, and Saudi families on shopping sprees book whole floors to stack their purchases from Harrods. We’ve sipped champagne in Boodles of Bond Street as actresses tried on million-pound necklaces.

These documentary gems enthral us because we are transported to a parallel world of obscene excess. Under Offer (BBC2) discovered a universe more overblown, more outrageously expensive than any we’ve seen before . . . and then casually chucked it away.

It’s hard to remember when such a great television find has been so badly wasted.

The find was Gary Hersham, a 61year-old estate agent in Mayfair, whose firm Beauchamp Estates deals in properties worth from £2 million to £120 million. Gary, a short-tempered man with the fleshy face of an elderly, dissipated cherub, treated buyers like pests and his staff like slaves.

He all but picked up one dowager client in a voluminous fur coat and threw her out of his office for getting underfoot. His chauffeur was so terrified of Gary’s fury that he drove with his legs crossed all day rather than daring to stop and nip into a public loo.

Any documentary maker with an ounce of wit would spot t hat Gary and his opulent houses were crying out for a series of their own. Instead, Under Offer complied to a monotonous formula, switching between estate agents in different markets around the country.

What could have been the most talked- about show for months became hair-tearingly tedious, as we sat through identikit segments of TV-by-numbers — an elderly couple buying a bungalow in Birmingham, an overpriced house near Sunderland that wouldn’t shift, a brash young man in Exeter haggling over a couple of thousand for a quick sale.

It’s easy to understand how the original concept got commissioned. Property programmes are popular; fly-on-the-wall footage makes good viewing; we’ve seen car dealers and interior designers and builders, but no one until now had thought to focus on estate agents.

But as soon Gary Hersham opened his mouth, the producers should have realised they had something different, something exceptional. Whether it was world-weariness or simply the knowledge borne of experience that he could say anything and his clients wouldn’t care, Gary was telling the truth about his multi-millionpound properties.

In a market where reality was irrelevant, he could set any price he liked: what mattered was his utter conviction. If he said a sixstorey terrace off Hyde Park was worth £40 million, it was — and the proof came when a buyer paid up without quibbling.

He showed us a place where only the original facade survived: everything else had been gutted to make space for 13 marble bathrooms and a leisure complex. To the Qataris who wanted to live in West London, he explained, the gym, cinema and swimming pool were the most important rooms.

Back at the office, his assistant Ernesto was having trouble finding the right set of keys for a £27 million ‘doer-upper’ house. Gary’s patience ran out in milliseconds. ‘Bleeding Spanish twerp,’ muttered the Basil Fawlty of Belgravia. We can only hope some quick-witted production company will snap him up for a future series.

And if any fashion designers were watching Monkey Planet (BBC1), they’ll be hot on the phones this morning to hire presenter George McGavin to model what will surely be next season’s best l ook — the orangutan neck-warmer.

Adorable Dora, a baby orang with a mischievous sparkle, was draped around George’s neck like a fox-fur stole at one point. The shout across Britain must have been audible in Borneo as millions of people sighed: ‘Ahhhh! I really want one of those.’

In a world where one house with a pool and 13 marble loos can cost more than a new hospital, what’s so improbable about orangutans as fashion-wear?