Property Ladder
From Frikipedia
Contents |
Overview
The rich get richer!
The Premise
In these heady days of the Great British housing market boom, where the Daily Mail consistently eschews war, famine and natural disaster in favour of front page news regarding the latest predictions for house price rises in Southern England (unless that natural disaster is a series of relatively minor floods across Southern England, in which case they'll go with how flood damage could affect property prices along with how the floods are all the fault of the Labour government), property is sexy. Which is why Channel 4 regularly deluges viewers with a litany of sexed up programmes with sexed up presenters about just how much moolah a variety of bland working couples are making by buying up suburban houses, kitting them out in Ikea-spec kitchen units and a few coats of Dulux and then selling them on to whichever desperate young professional is willing to sell his or her soul to a mortgage company in an effort to escape paying any more crippling rent for a dingy wooden-floored bedsit somewhere in Kensington.
The Show
Property Ladder is the sexiest of these shows, largely down to the oddly sultry form of perma-pregnent host Sarah Beeny. Ms Beeny talks with the kind of gravelly voice that infers a 40-a-day smoking habit you rather hope she packed in some time before she decided to become such a womb-based conveyor belt for however many mini-Beenys (Beeny babies?) she has decided to create, and is there to offer knowledgable advice to the featured amateur property developers whilst slinking around the lounge of their new purchase, running her hands seductively over the backs of the sofas and purring vague come-ons into the camera.
The show will usually feature two examples of rich folk cashing in on others misfortune. There's usually a fairly standard example of a married couple buying up an identikit detached house somewhere in Surrey coupled with a "crazy" couple who have decided to kit out a houseboat on the Thames, or deck out an old nuclear bunker in Hampshire like a tawdry 1970's shag palace. This contrast is there to highlight to other rich people that there is literally profit to be made anywhere. Buy a crumbling cowshed off a penniless farmer, install patio lighting, an open plan kitchen area and some high-quality hay bales with en-suite slop buckets and you'd probably still expect to make a 6 million percent profit on your investment, such is the stupifying state of England's rush for property.
The pitiless process of money hoarding will begin by said featured couples presenting their budgets to Ms Beeny. It is usually obvious to even the most dim-witted of viewers that they have woefully under-vauled everything they want to do. They'll probably want to install a big-screen TV, sofas made from the leather of twenty virgin cows and a jacuzzi which bubbles up fresh champagne from an underfloor piping system directly connected to the nearest Threshers on a budget of £4.27. This undervaluing is designed to add a sense of drama later on when the development is complete and viewers sit on the edge of their seats, worrying whether the over-budget couple will still make a profit to keep them in 4 x 4s and holidays to the Algarve for the year ahead. Without meaning to ruin the surprise, Friki would like to point out that they always do.
Beeny will poke her nose back through the door every now and again as we follow the smug bores through the trials and tribulations of gutting the interior of the house and remodelling it based on whatever vague sense of interior design they've managed to pick up from watching adverts for half-price sales in kitchen warehouses. Beeny will occasionally step in and express concern that the slow-witted pairing are planning to fit four bathrooms in a two bedroom house, or something equally stupid. The couple will either then nod and smile and say, "Yes, of course you're right, Sarah" to justify her existence on the show, or just ignore her completely and continue with their insane plans. Again, neither decision here is necessarily wrong, as they'll still be in the money by the end of it, even if they kitted out the nursery with a pit of spikes, baby-height cabinets full of jars of asprin with the lids half off and a paedophile drop-in centre where the en-suite bathroom used to be.
The Verdicts
Once the questionable renovations are complete, three random estate agents will walk around the house umm-ing and aah-ing and coming out with trite soundbites like "I like what they've done with the walls" or something equally banal. They'll value the house bafflingly highly to the point that you actually reckon you could get them to value your shoe as an investment opportunity at something nearing £250,000, and the show will end with Ms Beeny informing the by now impossibly smug couples that they've just made a fortune. Everyone breaks out the champagne, glasses clink, and we are invited to tune in next week, when a man with senile dementia picks up a freehold of a council flat in Hackney in a property auction he wandered into by mistake, defecates on the living room carpet and makes a £50,000 profit which he spends on ferrets.
Friki Conclusion
The minority spoiling it for the majority.
