Andrew Winter

It was 1996, I had just moved to central London from another part of the UK, a single man alone in his brand new dock side apartment, a great job in real estate, a nice car in the car park below, BUT I had a guilty secret.

I had just become addicted to a new format of TV called ‘the property show’ – this new genre was like a dream come true, not only did I spend all my working time looking at houses, now I could see them on my telly too! Remember this was an era ‘pre property web sites’ a dark time where only newspapers and walking around suburbs and their agencies would enable a person to get a fix of ‘property porn’ how I indulged.

That year a number of shows appeared, many lay in deep vaults now, Changing Rooms of course continued for many years.

Of course we are a sophisticated bunch now and these same shows would only be shown on a comedy slot, just to illustrate how far the TV Property Show and the market has come in the last 14/15 years. The information they gave then was weak, the camera work awful, the contributors all looked so shocked to be on TV, normal people weren’t on telly then, unless they were about to be sentenced for some wrong doing or had a won a medal in a sporting event. The shows told you how to paint over your tiles, paint wild mad colours everywhere, if something looked awful ‘put a curtain round it’ which is a simple rule i used on many occasions.

It was quite frankly all crap; Colin and Justin were wearing normal clothing and actually, scarily made more sense then! Such a weird time… but how I loved it.

A good friend of mine that shared my naughty secret and knew of my addition – said’ you should do one of those shows’ ‘I don’t think so’ was my very adamant reply,’ me on telly on a property show… I don’t think so somehow!

These days we are spoilt for choice with a plethora of property shows from the UK, USA, Canada and Australia featuring housing everywhere from Alaska to Auckland.

When I first started in this mad old job in late 2001, one thing I wanted was a show that was factual not fluffy and I think we are still on track with that.

Long live the Property Show.