This week there were two different programmes on telly featuring glossy young people tasked with selling luxury properties. There was Selling Super Houses, which began on Channel 4 on Tuesday, and Crazy Rich Agents: Selling Dream Homes, which finished on BBC Two on Sunday. It is unclear whether there is a difference between a “Super House” (has powers?) and a “Dream Home” (finds itself retaking the Leaving Cert in the nude?), but these shows basically have the same premise: hope-filled youngsters perform humiliating tasks for business moguls after which one of them is given the one job left in Britain.
Obviously, the way people do property outside of Ireland is all wrong. The real-estate brokers and prospective clients on these shows ask none of the right questions. For example: Could we slap a few pillars up to make it “classy”? I know the kitchen is already huge, but could we knock this back wall and build a huge glass “sun trap”, for I wish to trap my enemy, Sol, the sun? What would it take to convert this “luxury” home into 20 bedsits? Have any siblings fallen out over the inheritance of this house? (Like most Irish people, I prefer familial sadness to be embedded in the very walls of a place; it speaks to the quality of the property.) Does it have more bedrooms than my brother’s house? Do you think my parents prefer me or him? (This is v important.)
‘No salary, no safety net… Who will survive long enough to make a sale?’ is a tagline on the show and, also, a pretty good mission statement for Tory Britain
They also never ask the important rich-person-at-the-end-of-history questions. Is this house in a defensible position on a hill? Is there a place to store my gold when the banking system collapses? When my guards inevitably turn on me does the property have secret food stores known only to me? When the villagers come to pull me screaming to the scaffold, what is the soundproofing like? Will my surviving children be able to hear my screams in the hidden safe room? Does this property have a hidden safe room?
This leads me to the one good thing about the proliferation of shows like this: we now have a pretty good map of where all the rich ****ers live. If you’re like me, you’ve certainly made a list of potential locations for your dacha after the revolution. (I’m confident that you and I are very ideologically adaptable and will be useful functionaries in the party hierarchy.)
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Selling Super Houses is more cheaply and cheerfully The Apprentice-like than Crazy Rich Agents: Selling Dream Homes. (The latter is a more panoramically shot programme in which the rich appear rearing on cliffsides like magnificent stallions.) In Selling Super Houses Paul Kemsley is the mogul at whom the young must chuckle sycophantically before being dispatched to debase themselves. He likes to go by an initialism, “PK”, much like a bank, agricultural chemical or interesting disease. Also: his wife is a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, which means this is part of the Real Housewives cinematic universe and so may eventually feature Dorit Kemsley or the Hulk or whichever of them he’s married to.
At the outset we are introduced to eight wide-eyed hopefuls. There’s an Irish person who dreams of being an item on a listicle. “I want to be on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list,” she says while eyeing up properties for good road frontage.
[ From AI to clothing exchanges: the Irish on Forbes 30 under 30 listOpens in new window ]
There’s a photographer who says, “I want to look back at my life when I’m 80 and think I did good.” I picture her then, on her deathbed, wiping a happy tear and saying, “At least I facilitated the real-estate transactions of the superrich as the planet burned.”
There’s a volleyball player who says, “This is my chance! This is my time! This is now! This is Bobby!” With luck his name is Bobby or he’s off to a bad start. PK also speaks of himself in the third person from time to time, possibly for tax reasons.
They’re all told to prepare an “open house” viewing of a country pile. They theme the open house on F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which is, as you know, a novel about how amazing and supercool being rich is. Here are some more book recommendations in this spirit: Frankenstein (a heartwarming story of a scientist who never gave up on his dreams) and Wuthering Heights (about paragliding, probably).
If rich people actually read The Great Gatsby and understood its themes of moral emptiness and dissolute consumption, basing the staging of an open house on it might seem a bit insensitive, like hosting a Sophie’s Choice party for your favourite of the twins. Luckily rich people don’t read. They prefer to have their books liquidised and fed into their eyes with an eyedropper (more “luxurious”), so they think Gatsby is a pretty cool dude.
[ Why I love: The Great Gatsby, by F Scott FitzgeraldOpens in new window ]
It’s all a bit of a flop, nonetheless. PK’s enthusiastic charges hire a band that’s too loud, buy props that are too flimsy and book a contortionist for no clear reason. “The contortionist! I don’t even know why she was there!” PK cries. I feel like contortionists have to hear this a lot. He makes the wannabe real-estate agents cry because of their general ineptitude, but then something warms his icy heart (possibly an imminent tax cut), and he tells them he’s going to let them all stay working for him for free. Next week they will be working on a VIP’s house. “You definitely won’t be allowed to f**k this up,” he says, thus mocking the fates and drawing ruin upon his head.
As Crazy Rich Agents: Selling Dream Homes is slightly less daftly contrived (they’re doing more actual estate-agenting) and more beautifully filmed than Selling Super Houses, its overall effect is more insidious. Being unwholesomely rich looks great in this programme, and that the young people vying for a berth in this world aren’t remotely rich feels compellingly morally dissonant.
“No salary, no safety net ... Who will survive long enough to make a sale?” is a tagline on the show and, also, a pretty good mission statement for Tory Britain. Why, when many young people can’t afford a home, are shows like this so popular? It’s probably because when the basics of a good life – a flat, a secure job, a pension – become unimaginable you might as well dream of mansions, sports cars and superyachts.
[ We went on a TV property programme: Here’s what happened nextOpens in new window ]
This week the two finalists fly to New York, where they must impress the management of Nest Seekers International, who are going to give just one of them a six-month job placement. By the end of it I’m rooting for scrappy Krish over cheesy Aly, cheering him on despite the fact that if he succeeds he will some day visit an elite party where a Michelin-starred chef cooks him a human foot. To which all I can say is ... yum.
