Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country

Every now and again a program comes on the screen that makes you do a double take.  This week it is "Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country".  In this program a lady called Sarah Beeny who usually fronts "property porn" programs builds a new house in the country.  

This would be upsetting enough for many viewers who are struggling to get on the increasingly high first rung of the ludicrous property "ladder" (now more of a drawbridge, moat and stilts) but just to rub salt in the wounds of the left wing and poor Channel 4 has scheduled it directly after Channel 4 News so they can't avoid seeing at least the start of it.  After an hour of hard news, analysis and socio-political comment there's surely nothing more that people want to see than someone rich enough to live where they like and build their own home doing just that.  If it was hidden away in the daytime or evening schedules they might have got away with it but the contrast between the two programs is so stark it's like ... I can't even find a simile.

To make it extra painful to watch Sarah Beeny doesn't actually build a house at all.  Having bought the plot of land she intends to live on becuase foundations have been laid so she does not need planning permission she promptly decides that the house is facing the wrong way and needs to be turned round and moved down the field so that the yokels/plebs can't see in.  This the requires a new planning permission application to be put in which takes "over two months" during which time Ms Beeny has nothing to do but dig a drainage ditch, make her children jump in a home made lake and moan like an eighteenth century land owner who can't get their Enclosure Act through Parliament.

I thought well it's not my cup of tea but presumably someone likes this rubbish but then ... a quick google search reveals that no they don't.  Indeed it is rather cheeringly relentlessly slagged off everywhere from the Telegraph to the Guardian.  Birmingham Live catalogues tweets such as "50,000 are dead and millions are losing their jobs. Do you think they want to see you building a huge house?"

Well, possibly some might if she actually built a house.  Then at least that would be something that could be said for the program ...but most of it seemed to be her not building a house or arguing about what way it should be facing or what it should be made of.  The only redeeming feature one could find in the Beeny's characters is when they remarked to one another that no one else was interested.  Not even the four children they kept parading in front on the screen.  Just the two of them.  Very true.

Don't get me wrong there are much worse and more morally bancrupt programmes on television but for sheer vacuity this is very hard to beat.  It makes you wonder not only about the producers, directors, stars? and schedulers but whether there's any hope left for television as a medium or indeed for civilisation in general.