What happens when you combine the drone shots and growling pomp of The Apprentice with the super-prime real estate and saying-nothing-while-holding-a-champagne-glass glamour of Selling Sunset? Well, you get the same programme twice, actually: Crazy Rich Agents, which is BBC Two’s latest one, and Selling Super Houses, which is Channel 4’s.
Is it interesting or strange that two of the UK’s leading channels have essentially made the same show in different flavours (roughly: eight people compete in a series of half-challenges to prove they are the best high-end estate agent going; the last one standing gets a job)? The answer is: both. I needn’t tell you what’s going on with housing in this country – how’s your mortgage? Or worse, your rent? Well yeah, exactly – and the sheer real-lifeness of UK housing right now demands one of two TV reactions. Programmes either make hard-hitting demands for rent/interest-rate controls via gritty heart-changing documentaries that loudly whistle-blow about the corrupted future that looms if nothing is done. Or – and hear me out! Hear me out! – we all get to look at nice houses we can’t afford instead. So anyway, here’s Selling Super Houses.
Selling Super Houses sees Paul “PK” Kemsley (a feature of the Real Housewives extended universe) take on the Lord Sugar role, and he’s good at it: the same “I’m an East End geezer … and YOU’RE a bladdy mug!” boy-done-good disdain, the same strange-shaped jokes that don’t quite land, a similarly clipped silver stubble. He prowls into rooms and holds his hands together in a steeple and tells the agents that they all need to “hustle”. He keeps telling them “he wants everyone to win” because “if they make money, he makes money”. He wears an extraordinary range of bizarre zip-up cardigans instead of a suit. He keeps, keeps, keeps telling us he’s sold more than a billion dollars’ worth of real estate. And then he climbs into a tinted-out Range Rover and lets these idiots do nothing for 40 minutes.
My preferred format of competition television is when every contestant is rubbish – this is why I love The Apprentice (morons) and feel indifference for Bake Off (nice people who practice hard). Selling Super Houses then, to me, is gorgeous: these people would struggle to sell ecstasy at a rave. They’re all almost complete amateurs when it comes to real estate, which adds some verve: there’s Pam, a fashion designer who calls in sick to the second day of the competiton; Mairead, an executive assistant who wants to be on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list within the next 18 months despite messing up the easiest part of this week’s task; Colin, a surveyor who already ran one estate agent business into the ground (the estate-agency industry is the closest this country has to a licence to print money, so how inept he had to be to do that, I don’t know) and clearly has designs on another. You get the idea a lot of these contestants are only taking the show half-seriously: Bobby tells everyone he had to skip a volleyball tournament to be here and does seem quite genuinely pained about that; Rasa, a customer executive with a casino background, kills every conversation dead by responding to everything ever said to her with a chilling: “Exactly.” My favourite is David, 41 years old and unemployed, who looks like a sort of distant Harry Styles cousin who spends every family barbecue gazing across the garden and wondering if he wasted the gifts of his youth. If any of them win, I hope it’s him.
Sadly, this all makes for very good brain-off television. There is nothing like looking at a rich person’s house (a three-bed in Bayswater with a shared garden: £4.m!) and thinking: “I may be poor but at least I have better taste than that.” You see disjointed floor plans and ghoulishly soulless furniture and feel a little bit better, at least, about your own sofa and chairs. You calculate how long it takes them to get from their outer-M25 mansion into town and feel good about your own proximity to the tube. Yes, they have a garden and a swimming pool and underfloor heating and four cars, but the art they put in the bathroom is repulsive, so at least there’s that. In an economy where not one of you reading this can afford to buy the housing in question, there is something perversely enjoyable about looking at it and knowing you don’t like it anyway.
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There’s a lot going on with the housing market in this country, and a lot of talking points that I feel should probably be addressed in parliament but never will be. But for now this is TV, and we’ve opted to make the estate agents – the worst part of the industry by far – a little bit famous. Will we rue this decision one day? Undoubtedly. But for now: wow, look! Look at that house!
