There’s trouble in suburban paradise for Kirstie and Phil
Other people’s domestic l i ves are best avoided. the golden rule is never to get involved. When a couple at a dinner party are looking daggers at each other, or the neighbours are hurling crockery, pretend you see and hear nothing.
Discretion has its limits, though. Sometimes the tension is so ominous that we’re obliged to speak up, if only to save someone from being throttled. And that’s the sad case with Location, Location, Location (C4).
Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer were television’s flirtiest couple when the show first aired 15 years ago. they are both happily attached to different people, of course — Phil to Fiona, an Australian, and Kirstie to property developer Ben.
But the giggling, the nudges, the touching, the double entendres were so overdone between the hosts of this house-buying hit that the whole country was speculating about what we shall euphemistically call ‘ the exact nature of their relationship’.
We hadn’t seen anyone this lovedup on telly since Bruce Forsyth and Anthea ‘ Give Us A twirl’ redfern were doing the Generation Game.
Alas, the spark has fizzled. the made-for-tv fatal attraction is stone dead. Instead of a peck on the cheek, Kirstie is more likely to bite Phil’s head off — and she does, every couple of minutes.
‘ If this isn’t a flat white,’ she snapped, as a diffident Phil brought her a takeaway coffee, ‘I’ll flatten you.’ he flinched as he handed her the paper cup, with the guilty expression of a man who has bought a latte because it was 20p cheaper.
Sometimes, she was just plain spiteful. ‘I’ve no objection to people dancing naked round their living room,’ she announced, ‘ but that doesn’t apply to you Phil. Clothes on at all times.’ the poor bloke hadn’t even spoken.
Kirstie had some cause for her strops. She’s had an accident with a vegetable grater, and her thumb was swaddled in bandages. ‘ It’s really painful — I’m quite sharp and batey,’ she warned him.
But that seemed like an excuse for some deeper antipathy. When Phil wasn’t around, her temper improved, as she zipped around Cambridge on a trendy scooter.
Unlike the presenters’ rapport, the estate agency aspect of Location x3 is still functioning. the new series made a passable start, because neither couple were timewasters — they genuinely wanted to buy.
Michelle and Phillip were young doctors about to live together for the first time. they had a budget of £ 350,000, which was a lifetime’s earning’s not so long ago — now they were lucky to snap up a twobedroom Sixties terrace house for that. And they only got it that cheap because the vendor liked them.
Commuters Chris and Louise had £800,000 to spend, and even that doesn’t buy you a mansion in Cambridgeshire these days. they settled for a barn conversion.
In both cases, it was the women who decided what to buy. Any say the blokes had in the matter was illusory. As Phil Spencer knows to his cost, it’s never worth arguing.
Former Countryfile presenter Julia Bradbury has a knack for getting men to do her bidding, too.
She talked ‘my friend Martin’, a seaweed fisherman on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer hebrides, to take her out on his floating combine harvester, and then to run a clifftop bath for her. Instead of soap bubbles, she had fresh bladderwrack weed — it has antiageing qualities, we learned in The Wonder Of Britain (ITV).
this episode focused on stories from around our coastline, which has so many inlets that it’s said to be longer than the coast of India. It was glorious stuff, though it would have been better for more aerial photography and fewer clunky computer graphics.
Over on BBC2 an hour earlier, Coast had visited Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, home to Britain’s f i rst coastguard station. Julia was there, too, but for another reason — to see the seabirds on Farne Islands.
the nesting terns weren’t too welcoming, though. they divebombed her. You could say it was grumpy birds on every channel.