CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: House won’t sell? Don’t drop the price, just reposition the cooker!
Britain’s Most Expensive Houses
Rating: **
The Great British Dig: History In Your Back Garden
Rating: ***
With the housing market in the doldrums and mortgage costs spiralling, prospective sellers need more than a helping hand. Magical powers are required. Enter the feng shui master.
With only a compass and a bowl of sacred water, experts in this ancient Chinese art can purify any home and attract oriental buyers with overflowing wallets.
Don’t dismiss this as mere superstition. The property gurus at Sotheby’s, London’s swankiest estate agents, set aside all scepticism as they placed a £29 million mansion on the market, in Britain’s Most Expensive Houses (Ch4).
The property gurus at Sotheby’s, London’s swankiest estate agents, set aside all scepticism as they placed a £29 million mansion on the market
The pad in Hanover Terrace, owned by taxi driver turned multi-millionaire philanthropist John Griffin, was designed by the Prince Regent’s favourite architect, John Nash, the chap who also did Buckingham Palace and Marble Arch.
Inexplicably, the diary wasn’t choc-a-bloc with bookings. Feng shui, a mystical system of arranging the furniture to attract good luck, was Sotheby’s solution.
The master floated through the rooms in a semi-trance, smiling benignly, like the Dalai Lama in a Savile Row suit. He approved of the Regent’s Park boating lake visible from the first floor, explaining that money would flow off the water and in through the windows.
But he didn’t like the angle of the kitchen cooker. A stove facing the wrong way can spread disease, apparently. And he was horrified to see flowers on the windowsill, because they promote extramarital romance.
Ladies, if you suspect your husbands of straying, bin the blooms. A fistful of carnations in a vase is asking for trouble — any red-blooded male will take one look and fling himself into an office romance.
One more thing: never have mirrors facing your bed. That’s a prime cause of restless nights. Also, though the shaman didn’t mention this, it might make your bedroom look like the set of a 1970s soft porn movie.
Sotheby’s took all this timeless wisdom quite seriously. I’m not sure narrator Don Warrington did, but then, his voice always drips with sophisticated cynicism, even when he’s not playing the world-weary police commissioner from Death In Paradise.
The Romans didn’t bother about subtleties of layout or compass points when they built their forts and roads, as Hugh Dennis discovered on the return of The Great British Dig
Running his eye over the kitchen at a replica Georgian country house in Bath, he noted mockingly that it boasted ‘ovens galore and not an air fryer in sight’. Then we took a tour of the bedrooms.
Here and in other properties on show, it appeared to be the fashion to leave the bedsheets artfully rumpled — not exactly Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, but not hospital corners either. Surely this can’t promote good feng shui.
Haberdashery of the night
On Blackadder: The Lost Pilot (Gold), writer Richard Curtis revealed he was paid so little that his fee was less than the costume department spent on one of Rowan Atkinson’s hats. Thank goodness for Four Weddings And A Funeral, eh Richard?
The Romans didn’t bother about subtleties of layout or compass points when they built their forts and roads, as Hugh Dennis discovered on the return of The Great British Dig (More4).
The stone expressway that carved across Devon was the width of a three-lane motorway. The emperor’s army arrived in 43AD and seven years later they’d reached the borders of Cornwall. What brought them so far west wasn’t clear but they hadn’t come on their holidays — a formidable military camp was built in a matter of weeks.
Hugh recruited amateur archaeologists to help with the dig in this amiably informative programme, and they duly discovered coins, pottery and evidence of mining.
Local vicar the Rev Chris Painter, a history buff, was thrilled to join in. ‘I’m like a kid getting a holiday job in a sweet shop,’ he said.
Less thrilled was the organiser of the local pub quiz, who invited Hugh to read out some questions. His softly-spoken style didn’t impress her, and she relieved him of duties. ‘Leave it to the professionals,’ she advised.
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