This Is My House has rekindled my love for the BBC

Here’s a thought that will make you feel old. Or worried. Or both. The poke-fun-at-celebrity-houses series Through the Keyhole — originally presented by Loyd Grossman — was first broadcast as a segment on TV-am in February 1983. That means that we are now as far away in time from Through the Keyhole’s first episode as its debut was from the end of the second world war.

It has endured almost till the present (I actually preferred the Keith Lemon version to the stilted and slightly turgid original) because it’s such an addictive format. Most of us fancy ourselves as amateur psychologist sleuths, picking up on those telling details missed by others less blessed with our perspicacity. And of course who doesn’t like snooping round other people’s houses, either giving their good taste our seal of approval or, more often, sneering at how woefully they fall short? Snobbery, prurience and parlour-game guessing: the formula is perfect.

So we can hardly blame the BBC for ripping it off wholesale in its new series This Is My House. To give it bottom, they’ve recruited their star roving foreign adventure correspondent Stacey Dooley to be presenter; and to give it that sheen of BBC familiarity they’ve recruited the usual gamut of multi-racial, poly-gendered, BBC-approved celebrity regulars: the camp one, the fat, balding, white-but-it’s-OK-because-he’s-woke comedian one, the unknown comic who is half Jamaican and half ‘British-Greek’ and talks a lot about racism.

For obvious reasons, therefore, I knew exactly which one of the four potential candidates named Fern was the real owner of the featured home in Ashford, Kent. Clearly, it wasn’t Fern the blonde American who claimed she’d bought the place mistakenly thinking Kent was in the Cotswolds; it wasn’t Fern the salt-of-the-earth Essex housewife (too right for the place and therefore a red herring); it wasn’t Fern the dark-haired girl with implausible glasses (too young and metropolitan).