Kirstie And Phil’s Love It Or List It
Rating: 
Suburbia Murder: The Lies
Rating: 
Your television is only a tiny world. There’s nearly 70 million of us watching across Britain, but just a tiny number squeeze their way onto the screen. Every night, many of the same faces are seen on every channel.
On Tuesday, for instance, Monica Galetti was visiting a modernist hotel made of glass beside Croatia’s gorgeous coast on BBC2 at 8pm, before judging the final of MasterChef: The Professionals on BBC1 an hour later.
As for Monica’s co-presenter, Gregg Wallace, as soon as he polishes off the last plateful tonight he’s off to C5 tomorrow, touring Copenhagen’s Christmas Market.
And it’s easy to name half a dozen others who are ever-present on our screens: Bradley Walsh, Joe Lycett, Gordon Ramsay, Romesh Ranganathan, Ashley Banjo — and, of course, Kirstie Allsopp.
It could be a series that runs for years. Each episode follows the same format: A couple that has outgrown their house must make a decision about whether they want to renovate or expand. Phil and Kirstie provide conflicting advice.
Kirstie’s Christmas crafting show featured on this page yesterday, and she was back a matter of hours later with a new series of Love It Or List It (C4), the property show she co-hosts with Phil Spencer.
They made it clear that they are not planning to reduce their television work. ‘We probably will be 99 when we finish making this series,’ Phil said.
And they’ll probably still be flirting madly with each other. Last night, Phil inquired about her undies and Kirstie teased him that she might not be wearing any: ‘Leaving the house in a dress, you’re always at risk of having no knickers on.’ (TMI, Kirstie!)
It could be a series that runs unchanged for years. Each episode follows the same format: A couple that has outgrown their house must make a decision about whether they want to renovate or move elsewhere. Phil and Kirstie provide conflicting advice.
Each episode can be different as no two couples will ever be the same.
This time, we met the world’s most stubborn man, a builder in Poole named Roy, and his long-suffering wife Sue. The couple had lived for twenty years with only a partial extension.
Roy was adamant that he wasn’t going to move. I suspect Sue didn’t really want to either — this was just her clever way of encouraging her husband to finish those little jobs he’d been putting off since the turn of the millennium. These are the minor details: fitting doors and plumbing the shower.
This show was devised to blend house-hunting with DIY tips, but the real pleasure is in nosing around other people’s homes and marvelling at the way they live. It’s all very watchable.
It’s also hard to switch off a gripping true-crime documentary. The ones that give a fresh perspective on an investigation or insight into the psychology behind murderers are worth watching.
Documentaries about true crime are worth watching if they offer either an interesting twist to the investigation or a deeper understanding of the psychology behind murderers. C5: The Lie About Murder in Suburbia
The Lie: Suburbia Murder (C5) doesn’t do neither. This two-parter, concluding tonight, examines the killing of mother-of-two Rachel O’Reilly at her home outside Dublin in 2004. The murder was clumsily staged to look like a burglary gone wrong, and police had strong suspicions about Rachel’s husband Joe from the first day.
Even viewers who knew nothing of the case will have shared those instincts, from the moment we first heard Joe’s clumsy phone messages to his wife before her body was found.
Rachel’s mother Rose said she realised her son-in-law committed the crime when she heard her daughter’s voice in her head, saying: ‘Mam — it was him.’
Luckily, the police didn’t have to rely on psychic evidence.
It’s a strange story, but this programme adds little to it.