Mediating home in an age of austerity: The values of British property television

History, housing and the UK property market

There is a range of social subjects who appear in British property television and who constitute the potential audience. These include current and prospective owner-occupiers, renters, and property-developers. It is largely through the roles they play (both on- and off-screen) that property TV, on the one hand, probes, deconstructs and reconstructs home-ownership as a normative aspiration for proper citizens and, on the other hand, exposes those who do not achieve property ownership as improper, poor (in both senses of the word) citizens. It is the complexity of this cast of social actors that is sometimes neglected in our analyses of lifestyle media. However, it is their scripts that reveal much about the fate of British political discourse on housing underlined most forcefully by the enduring salience of the concept of the nation as a property-owning democracy. This notion – commonly associated with the Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher and her policy on the sale of council housing to resident tenants under the Right to Buy scheme introduced in the early 1980s – is actually a rather older notion, dating to the 1920s and the Scottish Tory, Noel Skelton. For Skelton, the idea of a property-owning democracy emerged as a direct response to the challenge of socialism and the rise of the Labour party in the 1922 general election to become for the first time the second party in British politics. A property-owning democracy was part of what Skelton termed constructive conservatism – a programme of progressive reform affecting land, agriculture, industry, housing and pensions that he thought vital if the Conservative party were not to succumb to the growing popularity of the left in future elections. Skelton declared that

Until our educated and politically minded democracy has become predominantly a property-owning democracy neither the national equilibrium nor the balance of the life of the individual will be restored.

Inherent in such a formulation, even in 1923, was a moral and political sense that property could be a corrective to lost personal and social equilibrium. This nostalgic articulation of dis-ease with the present is worth bearing in mind in the current context because, as Bramall has argued,

the historical era of ‘austerity Britain’ (1939-1945) has been used as a representational resource and point of comparison and analogy in the discourse of austerity that emerged in the wake of the 2007-8 global financial crisis. (Bramall, 2013: 1)

In other words, while the more obvious historical analogy for the current crisis in Britain would be the 1920s and 1930s, what has actually occurred – in both popular culture and government rhetoric – has been the reactivation of a distinctly nationalist myth of the Second World War. Historian Malcolm Smith (2000) has argued that

If 1940 could be seen as a highpoint of national consciousness, the full impact seems soon to have dissipated into a nostalgic glow in the popular memory. That nostalgic glow is still with us in Britain, backlighting contemporary history, since representations of 1940 still constitute the foundation myth of a new Britain seen to have emerged from the war. (p. 5)

In popular British consumer culture, this nostalgia for collective national purpose in the face of adversity has been epitomised in the rise of the phrase, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. It comes originally from the British government’s Ministry of Information (formed in September 1939 when Britain declared war on Germany) and was intended to be deployed on the occasion of Nazi invasion. The poster was never used. Nonetheless, the phrase now decorates all manner of commodities from mugs to aprons, calendars to mouse mats. As Bex Lewis (2011) argues,

as the recession started to bite in 2008, sales of the design rocketed […] In February 2009, a spate of stories hit the national press: we heard that Gordon Brown had it pinned on his wall. Katie Price, Rupert Grint and James May were all spotted wearing the T-shirt. (p. 17)

The turn to the period of the Second World War as opposed to the 1920s and early 1930s is driven more by ideology than by historical sensibility. If the 1920s are remembered, then it is as likely to be the classed resistance of the Great Strike that is recalled as the distinct national image, and this contrasts sharply with the ‘we’re all in it together’ discourse which the Coalition government (2010–2015) repeatedly used in its austerity discourse and which so obviously borrowed from the popular memory of the collective war effort. This is best exemplified in David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative party conference in 2009 in the run-up to the general election that produced a rare Coalition government in Britain formed between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. In this speech, Cameron drew a picture of national crisis from which salvation was only possible through a collective effort to reduce the state, withdraw from Afghanistan and resurrect the primacy of family and community. Neoliberal in its politics, the speech told an emotional story of the British people as a single collective who Cameron was reawakening from their slumbers:

We all know how bad things are: massive debt, social breakdown, political disenchantment. But what I want to talk about today is how good things could be.

[…]

No, we will not make it if we pull in different directions, follow our own interests, take care of only ourselves. But if we pull together, come together, work together – we will get through this together. (Cameron, 2009)

The phrase ‘we’re all in it together’ subsequently became the defining catchphrase of political debate and frequently appeared in newspaper headlines and speeches by both government and opposition politicians who argued that the cuts to welfare precisely meant that we were not all in this together but rather were becoming ever more deeply divided by the public funding cuts that characterised the new austerity Britain.

Property television’s mediation of house and home is part of the wider cultural narrative being constructed about not just the UK housing crisis but also the neoliberal economic order itself. This is an ideological process in which the fate of home-ownership is still being worked through post-crisis. In some of the rich analyses of austerity to have emerged to date, there is a tendency to imply that all was well before the 2007–2008 crisis. While lifestyle television may have represented an affluent society able to realise ambitions for self-improvement through reflexive consumption, the reality of the housing market in the United Kingdom was already deeply problematic by the early 2000s as I argue below. Here, it is worth pausing briefly to consider some of the principal characteristics of the UK housing market in order better to understand the relationship of property TV to political discourse on housing from across the political spectrum. As Paul Hackett, Director of the Smith Institute, ¹ has argued,

the promise of home ownership has been at the heart of the UK’s political discourse since the mid-1970s when only half of households were owner–occupiers. Since Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ in the 1980s, a long line of housing ministers from both the main parties have pushed for policies to get more people onto the property ladder. (Hackett in Heywood, 2011: 3)

In 2013, the Office for National Statistics published a review of the past century of UK home-ownership based on data from the 2011 census. It noted that at the end of the First World War, 77 percent of households in England and Wales rented their homes with just 1 percent in social renting. It was in the 1950s that rates of home-ownership grew rapidly. By 1971, an equal percentage of UK households were owning and renting their homes, while the peak of social renting came in 1981 (just as the Right to Buy scheme was being introduced) by which point 31 percent of households were in social renting. Home-ownership peaked in 2001 when 69 percent of households were in owner-occupation. By 2011, this had fallen to 64 percent. UK property television was thus born during the first decade to see owner-occupation rates fall, a somewhat anomalous position that should alert us to the fact that the genre may be premised more on common aspirations than on shared realities of property ownership.

Rates of home-ownership have declined after each economic crisis in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, 1990s and again in the aftermath of the current recession. Partly, this has been the result of reduced access to mortgage advances; as Whitehead and Williams (2011) states,

Lower prices and interest rates have done little to improve access and affordability because the higher deposits faced by first-time buyers more than offset any reduction in prices and mortgage payments. (p. 1162)

With rates of owner-occupation and social renting declining, it has been private rental that has seen some of the most dramatic growth in the United Kingdom. Unlike some parts of Europe, including France and Germany, deregulation since the 1980s has meant that UK tenants have relatively limited security of tenure to their properties (the introduction of assured shorthold tenancies in 1988 means that most tenancies are for 6 or 12 months only) and is probably one reason for continuing aspirations to home-ownership. As Richard Ronald (2014) argues,

Plans for achieving ‘home ownership democracies’ that preceded the 2000s have thus been turned on their heads. New generations of vulnerable and low-income households have increasingly had to negotiate housing pathways shaped by less secure tenures and unaffordable market rents. Meanwhile governments that once pumped massive resources into pushing up home ownership rates are now facing growing private rental sectors and escalating housing allowance bills. (p. 1)

The rising housing benefit bills being paid for by UK tax payers stem from a housing market characterised by inflated private rental costs at the expense of building sufficient new homes (either for owner-occupation or social renting) and to the benefit of many buy-to-let landlords who, since 1996, have been able to access mortgages to facilitate individual capital investment for private rental. It is this market that accounts for a series such as the BBC’s Homes Under the Hammer which frequently traces the fortunes of buy-to-let homeowners’ purchases and renovations. While the aspiration to home-ownership has achieved normative status – as Mimi White (2013) argues, in such shows ‘the value of home ownership is taken for granted’ (p. 229) – the reality for many in the United Kingdom is that owning one’s home is a dream out of reach. The UK lobby group, HomeOwners Alliance (2012), has argued that

there is now a home ownership gap of approximately 20% between those who want to own their own homes and those who actually do. That means there are about 5 million households who want to own their own homes, but don’t. (p. 4)

For politicians used to advocating home-ownership as a defining British value and symbol of collective social achievement, this poses a major challenge. In the language of neoliberal political governance, this entails the strategic management of desire. As Ross Abbinnett (2012) has argued, in the context of ‘highly individuated, highly aestheticized cultures of consumption …political governance has become a matter of handling the excess of these cultures, of “rationalizing” their sovereignty’ (p. 28). Although it may be an unrealisable dream for many viewers, property television’s narrative drive is precisely towards the realisation of domestic aspiration framed as the buying, selling or substantial remodelling of home. Indeed, one of the tortuous pleasures of viewing these shows may be the realisation at one remove of the fantasy of home-ownership – free from the real constraints of finance, mobility and opportunity. The appeal of property television is not limited to actual homeowners or house hunters/sellers. Rather, these popular media narratives are part of the broader logic of consumerist aspiration that characterises the neoliberal imagination so strikingly articulated, for example, in the claim of Grant Shapps (2010), former Conservative coalition government housing minister,

I believe that home ownership is a very good thing. In fact I will work every day to help people achieve their aspirations to own their home. Of course I am not arguing that everyone should somehow aspire to home ownership. Renting a home can be a positive and flexible choice. And social housing provides a sense of security for millions of families. I am simply saying to those who aspire to own their own home, this Government will support you; you will not be ignored; the age of aspiration is back!

Within such discourse, individual aspiration itself becomes a marker of social mobility and the promise of a better life. While the narrative drive of these property shows is often upwards along the property ladder, their ideological insistence is on making aspirations to mobility normative as if the personal desire for improvement (by buying or renovating property) is itself the defining condition of possibility for gaining a new home and ‘moving on’. Participants’ desire to escape to the country or to a more marketable house is not only legitimised but also rendered a normative route into a property-owning democracy and into middle-class citizenship. Aspiration, even when unlikely to be fulfilled, is therefore a defining value both of property television and of British political discourse in the age of austerity. While not all viewers and citizens are able to buy the houses shown on screen, they may all aspire to do so. The will to want is made available to all by such property programmes, and in this way, they fulfil the inclusivity required of British public service broadcasters.

Property TV: the changing same?

Rather than wither on the vine, property television survived into the age of austerity, reinventing itself in myriad ways. One response to the financial crisis was to alter the scripts of existing series in ways that offered new opportunities for hosts to evidence their expertise and their sense of being ‘just like us’ through addressing directly the changed realities of house buying and selling. Phrases such as ‘in these difficult times’ started to pepper such shows, offering both temporal proximity and modification to the confident, and sometimes brash, cheer of earlier iterations. Rather than casting doubt on the wisdom of these popular advocates of conspicuous property consumption, these editorial changes seem to have reinforced what Angela Smith describes as the ‘host’s credibility as an expert in the field of property development encouraging viewers at home to engage in the discourse of expertise’ (Smith, 2010: 194), even if that expertise had now become the management of a turbulent housing and mortgage market.

Property television continues to appear on the primetime and daytime schedules of UK public service broadcasters, notably BBC and Channel 4. For instance, BBC1 transmits DIY SOS The Big Build in primetime, a home improvement show now in its 25th series which has a notable tendency towards refurbishment as collective effort and communal virtue: ‘Nick Knowles and the team issue a call to arms and recruit friends, family and local trades to help transform the homes of families across Britain’ (BBC One, 2014). Over at Channel 4, the picture is a little different. Most of the broadcaster’s property shows have migrated from the main channel to More4 which describes itself as editing ‘the multichannel maelstrom for the discerning viewer’. It is ‘upmarket with an ABC1 profile of 43% (VS 38% total commercial TV)’ and has higher than commercial average percentages of female and older viewers. Series such as Grand Designs and Location, Location, Location sit in More4’s top 10, alongside lifestyle shows such as Come Dine With Me. More4 describes its viewers to prospective advertisers as being ‘more commercially receptive’, noting that they are ‘healthy food lovers who always think of the calories in what they eat and consider their diet to be very healthy’ (More4 n.d.). The gender make-up of the audience is visible in More4’s downloadable presentation where there are 17 images of men and 17 images of women, but with many of these figuring ‘quality’ imported female-led dramas such as The Good Wife and Nashville. More4 is geared then to aspirational viewers who have the capital to realise these aspirations either through their spending power or via their aesthetic discernment.

While some popular programmes have survived from the pre-recessionary era, notably Location, Location, Location (hosted by Kirsty Allsopp and Phil Spencer), others such as Property Ladder (hosted by Sarah Beeny) have not. The reason for this is fairly clear; while Location is premised on house hunters’ search for a new home (a process which continued, albeit in reduced numbers, after the crash), Property Ladder was more aggressively based on the pecuniary advantage of making money from amateur property development. Its narrative logic was premised on short-term house price rises, something which did not hold good in the years immediately following the crisis, when average UK house prices dropped by approximately 17 percent (source: Halifax and Nationwide). As the market underpinning such conspicuous consumption collapsed, it was not only the programme’s narrative logic but also its moral tone that became suspect. Advocating a smash-and-grab approach to property development seemed out of step with the recessionary times and might have appeared reckless on the part of public service broadcasters. However, if we focus on presenters rather than programmes, what becomes evident is that one way of mediating the crisis was through the continuity of its expert hosts, as the table below demonstrates:

OPEN IN VIEWER

Presenter	Programme	Production
Sarah Beeny	Help! My House Is Falling Down Restoration Nightmare Sarah Beeny’s Selling Houses Double your House for Half the Money	Redhouse for Channel 4, 2010–2011 Renegade Pictures for Channel 4, 2010–2011 Reef Television for More4, 2012–2013 Redhouse for Channel 4, 2012–2013
Kirstie Allsopp	Kirstie’s Homemade Christmas Kirstie’s Handmade Britain Kirstie’s Vintage Home Kirstie Allsopp’s Home Style	Raise the Roof for More4, 2011 Raise the Roof for Channel 4, 2011– Raise the Roof for Channel 4, 2012– Raise the Roof for More4, 2013–
Phil Spencer	Phil Spencer: Secret Agent Phil: Secret Agent Down Under	Raise the Roof for Channel 4, 2012– Raise the Roof for More4, 2013–

Note. Where there is a dash, it signifies the series is ongoing and has not be announced to have ended.

It was this select band of cultural intermediaries who fronted the new formats that responded to the different economic and political contours of British society after the crash. If calm was in scarce supply, then these hosts could at least carry on, seemingly taking a fair proportion of the existing viewership with them.

Many new series emerged advising viewers how to manage the new property market. Phil Spencer Secret Agent, for example, explicitly addresses the challenges of selling houses in a market characterised by limited access to credit, falling house prices, job uncertainty and economic fragility. In this series, Spencer’s genial advisory tone articulates a concern with ‘getting offers on houses that haven’t been selling’. The format retains lifestyle TV’s promise to inform and educate by demythologising how to sell property in a difficult market. Typically, an episode opens with the scene of a middle-class leafy street with Spencer walking along and saying something like,

Mortgage approvals are down again and the average time it takes to sell your house is up […] Selling up and moving on just keeps getting harder.

This then cues the classic problem-solving logic of the makeover as Spencer helps sellers identify their property’s failings (e.g. being too cluttered or confusing in layout) in order to provide them with advice on how to transform the property in a week to get it into a better, more saleable condition. The voyeurism so characteristic of property television is fostered by the melodramatic idea of Spencer acting as undercover secret agent, first, to identify the limits of the property and, second, to reveal to sellers the feedback he has gathered from previous viewings. As Frances Bonner (2011) has argued, presenters have been central to television’s move from didactic instruction to a more advisory tone and a concomitant move from a relatively more realist to a relatively more melodramatic mode of engagement with viewers as neoliberal subjects geared towards reflexive consumption. Adding drama to what is a rather predictable narrative, Spencer’s undercover conceit uses filming at a later open house (by which time the house has been improved) to capture – and then share with viewers – the improved perceptions of potential buyers.

It is less the actual financial value of the property that is at stake in the series and more the ability to sell which is the concern. What makes the series appealing is the combination of familiar advice (e.g. redecorating to offer a blank canvas – a phrase even used in inverted commas by the participants themselves) with Spencer’s own friendly tone which modifies the rebuke common in the genre with a warmer, more appreciative discourse (e.g. ‘this is a team effort for the family’, or ‘I can see you’ve worked incredibly hard’). Spencer’s skill as a presenter lies in his performance of sincerity and sympathy, which is edited to appeal both to the viewer at home and to the participants on camera. For example, in an episode transmitted in April 2014, Spencer revisits the large country cottage that we had seen earlier as the cluttered hippy home of Oriole and her six daughters. On his return, Phil moves round the house and turning to camera confesses, ‘God, it looks different, it really does!’ The rare use of ‘God’ and the emphasis on really, together with the whispered tone to camera, imbue the statement with an authenticity of reaction and appreciation. As a voiceover, Spencer continues, ‘I can’t believe what Oriole has managed to do in a week’ – thereby publicly lauding her timely efforts without explicitly taking credit for the transformation himself. It is her labour – albeit alluded to only through quite brief clips – that is allowed to take centre stage in Spencer’s quite generous performance. In a sense, his is the very epitome of Keep Calm and Carry On as he negotiates the recognition of a crisis with the confident promise that ‘I’ve been travelling across Britain making it my mission to get offers on houses that haven’t been selling’. Notably, Spencer’s explicitly national mission is aimed at those in society who already own property, not those unable to get on the property ladder and whose off-screen labour is not being rewarded with a property of one’s own.

Restoring the nation: fragmented foundations of property TV

One way in which property TV has spoken to the anxieties of homeowners shaken by the crumbling housing market has been through series that warn us of the danger of the fabric of houses themselves. Beeny’s Help! My House Is Falling Down best exemplifies this highly melodramatic sub-genre. It redeploys the stern tone that Beeny cultivated in Property Ladder towards diagnosing and curing structural problems in participants’ homes. The series’ tone self-consciously combines property TV’s generic characteristics with those of gothic horror and domestic melodrama, the aim being to amuse and horrify the viewer safely ensconced on their sofa. Rather than provoking a desire to own a house, it elicits thankfulness: ‘I’m glad I don’t own that!’ As Jean Bruce (2009) has argued, in the domestic melodrama, the restoration of home is

achieved through an indirect route and only after the virtuous protagonist has experienced several extreme emotional ups and downs that we witness … the melodrama’s tendency is to displace social, domestic or familial anxieties into the mise-en-scène of the specific settings depicted. (p. 82)

The problems you don’t have become a source of relief in this austere version of property television. In its mode of address, it seems geared towards making the viewer thankful first and anxious second lest subsidence or Japanese knot-weed also be found on their own property. The series mediates some of the physical risks – as opposed to more directly market risks – of home-ownership; instead of the main focus being on rising or falling house prices, as in Property Snakes and Ladders, Beeny here tackles the physical mobility of homes cracking due to subsidence. Indeed, the series’ animating metaphor is precisely the fragility of property – dealing at one uncanny but safe remove with the fragility of the United Kingdom’s actual housing market.

A different relation to the fabric of home and to the fragility of national housing is found in those series that represent development as a historical or custodian value. Examples include Sarah Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare, The Restoration Man, Country House Rescue, and Grand Designs. Diverse though these programmes are, they share a concern with restoration as a cultural good. Working on properties in disrepair comes to be framed as a labour of love – a care, if not explicitly of the self, then of the fabric of the nation, its landscape and architecture. Makeover modalities – particularly the use of a ‘before and after’ narrative of transformation – remain important in these shows’ visual appeal and plot, but a new kind of moral tone, one that accrues considerable gravity in the voice of Kevin McCloud especially, is to be heard in these programmes. This kind of property TV has much in common with popular forms of history on television that focus on the personal and experiential (e.g. BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?; BBC Wales’ Coal House; Channel 4’s series The 1900 House and The 1940s House; PBS’ American Frontier House; and ABC’s Australian Outback House) and which are consequently much criticised by professional historians for their ahistorical concern with contemporary feeling and personal identity (see Bell and Gray, 2010). In the restoration mode of property TV, the invocation of history through architectural projects lends property ownership national value and moral worth. Rather than being property hunters eager to transform outdated housing into a modern and valuable ‘des-res’, the restoration mode dramatises highly personalised attempts to restore and renew. ‘You want’, as one participant tells us, ‘to do it for all the people before you’.

For example, the 2014 series of Channel 4’s The Restoration Man begins with the voiceover of the northern host, George Clarke, telling us that ‘Across Britain thousands of historic buildings have been neglected’. On screen, we see good quality aerial photography first of the British coastline, then of what appears to be a Tudor farmhouse and subsequently the slate tile roofs of a cityscape. Indeed, it would be easy for the glancing viewer to imagine they were watching the opening of an episode of the BBC’s Coast rather than an episode of property television. Both verbal and visual discourse draw on a set of national mythologies and contemporary TV innovations, especially the rise of geography TV (see Wheatley, 2011), to present the viewer with a sensibility of restoration’s national worth. The pre-title sequence progresses to tell the viewer that ‘Luckily some romantics do take on the challenge of converting and restoring these forgotten gems. But it isn’t for the faint-hearted’. This cues a mini-montage of images of bricklaying and plaster removal interspersed with to-camera shots of participants telling us, ‘It’s sat here and it’s falling apart’ or ‘I think it can push you to the limit actually’. The personal, affective narrative is one of heroic endurance; the historical narrative, meanwhile, is one of an inclusive (including in regional terms) national heritage as epitomised by the claim that mills and factories are ‘as rich as any stately home or medieval castles’ – a significant ideological adaption of social history’s claim to the importance of the ordinary and the everyday. Meanwhile, the visible disarray of a building site in development is becalmed with beautifully composed scenic shots of a chapel in ruins.

Participants are framed not in search of rapid pecuniary advantage but as national saviours with the labour and virtuous aspiration to improve and rebuild the very nation. Metonymically, it is as though the improved fabric of the property stands for the restored nation itself, recalling Skelton’s constructive Conservatism. Importantly, the fact that the work itself is actually screened and talked about so constantly, in both the experts’ narrative and their interaction with participants, functions to enrich the moral worth of property development. The capacity to be seen to be labouring (not always oneself, of course, but through considered project management) is integral to the virtue of the participants’ efforts and this all the more so when labour is imbued with a reflexive, historical and aesthetic consciousness. Here, the programme hosts combine a characteristic appeal to expert knowledge with an affective appeal to the viewer at home through sympathetic, critical assessments of the participants’ work and the authenticity of their restoration. The generic invitation to judge, so central to lifestyle television, endures but is re-cast as a more refined, aesthetic assessment of the fulfilment of the project’s objectives and its realisation of the restorative ideal. While some series such as Grand Designs are less concerned with restoration per se (they are normally new builds), this turn to architectural history as a route to securing moral value for property development is striking for how it invokes a sense of national history within the deeply classed framework of virtuous (i.e. aesthetically informed and capital-rich) labour. The future of capital becomes integrally bound to the land, to the nation, and its restoration through property development images the value of reflexive, aesthetically informed labour.

Vintage labour: crafting austere domesticity

At first sight, crafts on television may seem a far stretch from property TV. However, in this final section, I want to consider the gendered domestic labour of craft as a corollary to property development and as a distinct way in which television has mediated domestic aspiration and value through the idea of austerity. Undoubtedly, there is work to be done on the new generation of UK lifestyle television that focuses on a renewed interest in traditional domestic crafts from The Great British Bake Off to The Great British Sewing Bee to the craft programmes fronted and made by Kirstie Allsopp’s production company, including Kirstie’s Homemade Home. The continuity of presenter should alert us to the fact that these craft series do have a generic relationship to property TV if we understand that genre as being about the display of home and not just its acquisition. The visual discourse of property TV relies upon the camera’s attention to domestic detail; it lingers on aspects of interior design in order to persuade viewers of the rightness of a property and its imaginative possibilities. The ‘look’ of a property staged for inhabitation is core to the imaginative offer to the viewer. Moreover, as Giles (2002) notes, it is often central to the female expert’s discourse and the persuasive role it plays in rendering aesthetic taste hegemonic. Best known for co-hosting Location, Location, Location, Kirstie Allsopp has become a recognisable figure on British television and she has been credited with advising the Conservative party on the housing market (see Revill, 2007). Her persona in that series, and its spin-off Relocation Relocation, is produced through a sexualised and playful pairing with her male co-presenter, Phil Spencer. The Kirstie & Phil (2014) website sustains the romantic myth of Allsopp and Spencer:

I met my on screen husband Phil, and we began making Location Location Location & Relocation Relocation. We’ve been a happy couple for more than 10 years now.

This heterosexual erotic and romantic imaging of the hosts is one of the most visible instances of how the male/female pairing can be put to work in property TV as a kind of surrogate for the implied heterosexual couples at home who may be house hunting or just watching for pleasure. Kirstie’s performance of middle-class femininity is nostalgic but is carefully married with an overt emphasis on her career:

Throughout my career I’ve done some amazing things and met some wonderful people along the way.

First and foremost I’m a mum and more than anything I cherish family time with my partner Ben and our boys.

Property and interiors are in my blood […] I bought my first flat when I was 20 and it was almost inevitable I would end up involved in property as a profession.

Were she not quite so exceptional, she might be the very embodiment of the particular feminine subject, the yummy mummy – a middle-class maternal subject whose sexualised and highly stylised body operates indexically as evidence both of artful consumerism and as the performance of virtuous and accomplished labour. As Jo Littler (2013) argues, this social type is thoroughly classed and racialised and works socially to generate ‘a popular conservative fantasy’ (p. 233). While the photographs of Allsopp are indeed highly sexualised, they differ from comparably staged publicity shots of Sarah Beeny, for example, in the way that Allsopp’s pose and dress, together with the mise en scène, embody retrosexuality. The retrosexual feminine subject is a nostalgic, self-conscious construction of domestic femininity that plays with the supposed innocence of a heritage past with a modern, post-feminist present. It is almost literally a gendered vision of having your cake and eating it! The craft series fronted by Allsopp provide further evidence of how particular forms of symbolic and cultural capital are put to use in the affirmation of distinct, highly classed and gendered forms of skilled and affective labour on British TV screens. As several scholars have noted (Dawkins, 2011; Luckman, 2013), the renewed prominence of craft and craft production in Western cultures needs be situated in a historical framework:

Going back to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century, crafts and craftsmanship have a long history of being positioned as a moral corrective to alienating forms of industrial production. While it is true that the moral value of handmade goods is still articulated in opposition to ‘sweatshop’ or ‘machine-made’ goods, what is interesting about the discourse of handmade that has emerged in the last decade is its assertion not of particular artisanal qualities or labor concerns but of the pleasures and the transformative value of making things yourself. (Dawkins, 2011: 262)

The pleasure of making screened in craft series needs to be understood as a distinctly classed experience of labour. Susan Luckman (2013) understands craft as the ‘renewed popularity of the handmade … and its relation to economics of amateur labour’ seeing this as both the ‘return of credibility of previously disparaged women’s craft practices’ and as an example of the allure of the analogue in a digital age’ (p. 250). While craft may hold a radical possibility of critique, it is also vital to acknowledge the classed realities of some of these discourses, both current and historical. For much of the Arts and Crafts movement, the romance of craft was premised on an appreciation of the fruits of working-class labour as middle-class women were encouraged to purchase these artisanal goods as a form of distinction from mass-production of the Industrial Revolution. In the present, as Luckman (2013) notes, ‘not only is Indie craft … the domain of mostly middle-class women, in the US at least, it is also disproportionately, and frequently uncritically, almost exclusively white’ (p. 265).

It is not only the Victorian Arts and Craft Movement that provides a historical frame for understanding craft’s social import but also the culture of austerity. Striking in the fashion for 1940s and 1950s modes of domesticity ranging from baking to dressmaking to sewing is the wartime sensibility of Britain alluded to earlier, what Clarke and Newman (2012) understand as austerity’s dual political sensibility, namely, ‘the promise of hardship and the memory of postwar collective solidarities’ (p. 307). Such a configuration is far from neutral; indeed it remains integral, as Bramall (2013) argues, to how the Coalition government’s economic policy, including massive public spending cuts, have been understood and resisted. In the ‘make do and mend’ logic of Allsopp’s series, it is overwhelmingly the nostalgic aura of craft that dominates, much as it does in the products sold by her cousin, Cath Kidston. The tough realities of domestic piecework are disavowed; instead, this sensibility is framed as restorative and implicitly as a contemporary moral response to consumerism. Austerity thus becomes a salve to modernity’s excess, a virtuous corrective to ‘throw-away’ culture. An episode of Kirstie’s Vintage Home (series 1, episode 3), for example, begins with Kirstie asking us in the pre-title sequence,

What can you do when your house is more shabby than chic? When the thought of having guests, makes you want to move? And you’d rather throw out and spend rather than make do and mend? […] Fortunately the solution is at hand. We’re helping people make their houses into homes, going from battered and bruised, to hale and heartfelt, with a little bit of vintage inspiration, their own bare hands [Kirstie shows her hands as she walks along a terrace street in old-fashioned tea-dress] and that little bit of extra homemade magic. I’m helping them re-use, recycle, ditch the factory made for the home-made … who needs the new when you can discover the old?

Such a cheery disavowal of modernity allows the series thence to re-introduce aesthetic taste through the search for vintage goods in markets and other ‘alternative’ sites. Ostensibly a ‘tactic’ for managing domestic consumerism in the age of austerity, the crafting logic of make do and mend is, of course, productive of cultural value for the maker. In establishing her vintage pop-up shop on London’s Portobello road, Allsopp delivers expert designers to the glad people who are transformed from ‘novice crafters into devoted home-makers’. Morally valued handmade labour is thus delivered through such property TV.

Conclusion

The values of neoliberalism have proved remarkably resilient in the face of the global financial crisis and the recessions it occasioned across the globe. Cultural studies scholars can contribute to the analysis of neoliberalism’s resilience by detailing the myriad, complex ways in which popular culture operates as a contested symbolic arena for the representation and working through of neoliberal values. Power and narrative – longstanding concerns of cultural studies as a political as well as intellectual project – are vitally important here. As this essay has demonstrated, the stories individuals, politicians and nations tell of why austerity is necessary, desirable and moral need to be critically dissected by those of us who find the price being paid by citizens for the banking crisis profoundly immoral and injurious. Property television, I have argued, is especially ripe for such analysis because it sutures the aspirational, financial and social horizons of viewers to the banking systems, the housing market and the policy investments of successive British governments in the notion of a property-owning democracy. The aspiration to home-ownership common in Britain should not be dismissed; it speaks to the genuine desire of citizens to determine their own fates in the most basic way of having control over the roof over their own heads. Yet this aspiration is clearly illusory for a great many who can neither afford to buy a home nor find long-term secure tenancies in the highly deregulated rental sector. The mediation of home-ownership as a foundation for citizenship has in recent years been tied into a nostalgic and deeply nationalist project to convince British citizens that ‘we are all in it together’. This has entailed the revival of wartime austerity as a cultural narrative to make sense of the present crisis and programme of public spending cuts. While some iterations of British property television draw explicitly on this narrative – as in Allsop’s craft shows – others have dealt with financial uncertainty at one melodramatic remove by providing gothic images of crumbling homes that can be restored to national safety. Yet a common thread in so many of these series is the provision of reassurance from property experts who remain keen to tell us that this market can be effectively negotiated by the careful, reflexive consumer. That such reassurance is necessary betrays the truth that many of us do not really buy the message that we need just to keep calm and carry on.