TV review: How to Live Mortgage Free – Should have been eye-opening

Like most people with a mortgage, I feel simultaneously lucky to even have one in the first place, and also as if there’s a huge grizzly bear sitting next to me, just biding its time before it bites me in the arse.

I understand though, that this is a luxury problem. I was of the generation where it was possible to get an interest-only mortgage for £180 a month. If I was in my 20s now, I know that I would be living in an expensive flatshare with some random guy called Gordon who puts passive aggressive Post-it notes on his almond milk.

For this reason, How to Live Mortgage Free with Sarah Beeny should have been an eye-opening insight into alternative ways of living. Maybe a place of your own isn’t an impossible dream reserved for baby boomers and Russian oligarchs?

But of course, I was forgetting the cardinal rule of all property programmes. It is the law that they must focus on a small clique of posh, beard-cultivating, trust fund-bothering artisanal spoon carvers who live in converted packing crates on the Thames and have a budget of three million pounds.

Maybe a place of your own isn’t an impossible dream reserved for baby boomers and Russian oligarchs?

Enter Kimberley, who was a part-time model. When she wasn’t modelling, Kimberley was wearing a hat with flowers on it and being winsome and kooky, like the love child of Mr Bloom and Felicity Kendal. She had somehow procured herself a rusty Dutch houseboat which she was trying to do up by brushing paint on it with the tiniest brush I have ever seen.

Beeny, always watchable and always game, went to talk to her but you could see they were having trouble relating to each other. Instead, Sarah recruited her pal, designer and professional upcycler (ugh) Max McMurdo, to give her advice about how to make the most of the poky rustbucket.

“You haven’t got much storage under there,” he said, lifting a floorboard. “But it’s cold, so it’s a good place to put your potatoes.” (Living the dream, eh?)

There was something a bit fishy about both the boat and the set-up. When the renovation was revealed, it was packed with stuff that looked like it was from the props department. In the end Kimberley had also mysteriously managed to conjure £32,000 to do it up, which she vaguely waved away as something to do with getting her rental deposit back.

After meeting an artist who lived in a flat-pack church (AS YOU DO), it was clear that if you want to live without a mortgage, you’d better be absurdly lucky, a professional house builder or have untold amounts of cash to spend – or all three. For all of Beeny’s trademark chutzpah, it wasn’t difficult to see this show for what it was; another way to showcase a bunch of nice houses we’ll never own in a million years.

How to Live Mortgage Free with Sarah Beeny, Wednesdays, 8pm, Channel 4