3:26pm Friday 19th February 2010
By Andrew Mosley
TELEVISION seems designed to provoke jealousy.
I’m not normally the type to be envious of someone else’s far superior life, but this had my blood boiling.
Basically, Phil Spencer has been paid for jetting off to Sydney and searching for a house for a family, while also looking for a holiday pad for himself and his wife.
Phil hasn’t even got the decency to make this look like hard work, instead taking himself off down the beach and indulging in a bit of Aussie Rules practice in between showing an annoying Army chap and his wife around a few houses, one of which had its own swimming pool. Grrr...
In between all this graft, we get to see Phil and his Australian wife looking at a few plots of land on which they may build their own home.
Sydney is my favourite place — there are quite a few I have never been to — and living on the other side of the world in cold and grimy Bolton does not make it easily accessible.
Phil travels round a few Sydney suburbs, takes a ferry ride by the Opera House and Harbour Bridge and generally does anything possible to further provoke my envy.
The official premise of this programme, according to the Channel4 website, is “with a wife from Melbourne and an extensive knowledge of the Aussie property market, Phil uses his experience to find four emigrating British families their perfect pads down under”. That’s good of him. Very kind. Nice bloke, Phil.
This week the search focused on the Northern Beaches area of Sydney. Jon and Jeannette had lived in military accommodation for most of their married life and throughout the former’s various forces postings.
To make the situation EVEN more difficult for Phil, Jon’s mother Joan needs her own space in the new family home. Phil shows them a couple of options and almost succeeds, then takes a tour round a couple of posh houses just to spin the programme out a bit, and tells you again how he quite fancies building a place here. Yes we know, so do I, but unless I turn to serious crime or win a major amount of cash, I won’t be able to.
There’s a bit of advice on what sort of occupations are most likely to land you a place in Oz — qualifying as a physio could net you around £41,000 a year, though a greenkeeper’s job may only pay £15,000 — then, bingo, a bid for a house of £327,500, just £2,500 above the offers-over price, is lodged by Phil and accepted by the vendors.
Phil goes back some time later to find the smug new owners have done the place up a treat and “the children are in the pool every day”. Lovely for them, but I’d rather be sharing a public pool in Bolton with hundreds of other sun-deprived types! Oh yes!
I anticipate Phil will expand this series to other nice places around the world — but don’t expect to bump into him anywhere round here soon.
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