Smugness on every channel

I am beginning to dislike Kirsty Allsop. I used to love Location-Location, but I am disillusioned. All she does is marry ‘smug-30-somethings’ with picture-box cottages in Cornwall, wearing her natty Hobbs outfit, looking smug. She never even bothers to ask her smug clients where the hell they got the cash from.

Please ask them Kirsty; if only so I can apply for whatever dreadfully overpaid job they’re doing.

Life, I have realised, is nothing like Location-Location. Nevertheless, I am sure most of us have spent at least 200 hours of our lives watching couples (mainly smug) agonise over whether to stretch their budget to £650,000 for the thatched cottage or stick at £599,000 for the converted barn in the middle of nowhere. And you know something else? I bet there’s never actually anyone on the end of the phone when they talk to the ‘estate agents’ from the gastro-pub beer garden.

But in ‘Smug aspirational TV stakes’, Kirsty and Phil don’t hold a candle to Grand Designs. You too can have your dream-lifestyle; build your fantasy perspex home with its eco-composting, sustainable insulation and antique bath tiles. That is of course if you have a quarter of a million in the bank, a year off work, and are, as well as being a financial advisor, a highly capable electrician.

Rich people used to spare us the details of their wealth by building high fences around their giant homes and blacking out their car windows. Now we must watch it all on every channel. And we’ve got time on our hands, we the great unwashed, as we wait patiently for our fortnightly dole appointment.  Of course we’re not all cashing our dole cheques and drinking white-lightning, but we might as well be lying in a ditch for all the respect we’d get at a middle-class, ‘smug’ inhabited dinner party.

For years, we have made the error of contrasting ourselves unfavourably with television stars, imagining we know them when all we really know is a carefully edited presentation. But these are supposed ordinary people. Albeit ordinary people with far from ordinary bank accounts.

Perhaps these TV shows should just come right out and say it, ‘This is what you could have won;’ if only you’d been born in Downton Abbey, married a banker, or been properly schooled.

I might have to change the channel and watch TV shows where the characters are renting their homes, worrying about money, and the only homage to green living is low energy light bulbs.

Coronation Street. That seems like a good bet.  I can watch from my pleasant rented flat as a working-class single mother who struggles with her weight is made redundant. Perhaps for a change, I will not feel like a cider drinking down-and-out.

What? Is that Leanne Battersby wearing MY jumper? Oh the shame. I knew shopping in Primark was a bad idea. Maybe I’ll switch back and continue envying Kirsty’s new coat. Superiority is overrated anyway.