My faith in humanity is shattered

IT’S BLASTED, cracked, pul­ver­ized, demol­ished and des­troyed. What could bring on such a calam­ity? The news that HGTV’S House Hunters show is fake.

The show’s format is simple: a couple look­ing for a house are shown three prop­er­ties and have to choose the one best suited to their tastes and budget. Almost inev­it­ably none of the houses come up to their exact­ing stand­ards of kit­chen amen­it­ies or under their budget but nev­er­the­less they pick one. Although it now appears that they opt for the one they’ve already bought. The two rejec­ted ones are just there to give view­ers the fun of pick­ing one them­selves and then shout­ing at the screen when the couple chooses another. The fakery was revealed back in 2008 but no one paid any atten­tion to it, and then again in 2010 and this year by the blog Hooked on Houses.

House Hunters is one of those pro­grammes I was slowly drawn into because Ev watched it and I absorbed it through some kind of twis­ted osmosis, usu­ally while try­ing to read. It’s not great tele­vi­sion, not by a long shot (that title belongs to RuPaul’s Drag Race) but it is fas­cin­at­ing for the con­tinual pro­ces­sion of bloody idi­ots who appear on it. Buy­ing a house is a long, com­plic­ated and bor­ing pro­cess - I should know, I’ve done it twice - but it’s still inter­est­ing to watch from a purely voyeur­istic point of view and let’s face it, 90% of TV shows these days are basic­ally leg­al­ised voyeur­ism. After all, you’re get­ting to see the insides of other people’s houses and take the piss out of their ter­rible dec­or­at­ing decisions, says the guy sit­ting in a blood-red room with a shelf full of toy Minis.

Why are they idi­ots? Well, they’re not all idi­ots but gen­er­ally the people ostens­ibly look­ing for houses will bitch and moan about stuff that really isn’t worth bitch­ing and moan­ing about. Our per­sonal favour­ites include the woman who thought the liv­ing room was a hor­rible col­our (it’s called paint, dear, and you can buy it at sev­eral thou­sand loc­a­tions); the bloke who looked at a huge house in Atlanta with five bed­rooms and a garden the size of Regent’s Park and promptly com­plained that it was too expens­ive at $250,000, a fig­ure that would barely cover a card­board box under a bridge here in South­ern Cali­for­nia; and the inev­it­able and prac­tic­ally man­dat­ory com­plaints that the gran­ite coun­ter­tops are older than six months or the bath­room isn’t the size of Rhode Island.

Try using it for a drink­ing game. Take a shot every time one of the “hunters’ says, “Those kit­chen coun­ters don’t look like gran­ite”. Take another when the words “I don’t like the col­our of the walls” waft from the telly’s speaker. Have one when the bloke com­plains about the 70s wood pan­el­ling. And help your­self to another shot - assum­ing you’re still in pos­ses­sion of alco­hol - if the immor­tal phrase “this would be great for enter­tain­ing” leaves the mouth of any­one on the screen. You’ll be pissed as a rat by the second ad break and dead by the third. But the news that the show is, to use a tech­nical term, bull­shit makes me real­ise why the hunters always choose a crappy expens­ive home over a cheaper, bet­ter one.

The news that House Hunters is fab­ric­ated raises the ques­tion of whether its inter­na­tional ver­sion - ima­gin­at­ively called House Hunters Inter­na­tional - is also fake, although the idea that HGTV would shell out for people to fly to Paris, Albania, Lon­don, Bar­ba­dos and other loc­a­tions just to be paid to lie on cam­era is almost too ludicrous to entertain. Then again Fox News is an actual thing, so I guess I shouldn’t be too sur­prised. If any­thing the people on HHI are even more stu­pid because it’s obvi­ous they’ve done abso­lutely no research on the places they want to live in, like the woman who wanted to move to Paris and buy a flat over­look­ing the Seine whose budget would barely have covered a trailer in Alabama. And some­times it’s just cringe-making watch­ing some idiot Amer­ican who doesn’t real­ise that not all coun­tries put a premium on hav­ing mul­tiple bath­rooms, gran­ite kit­chens with stainless-steel fit­tings and closets big enough to walk through slag­ging off a small Irish cot­tage because none of the taps are made by Kohler.

I don’t know why HGTV went to the effort of fak­ing this show. I mean, how des­per­ate for it were they that someone some­where gave the go-ahead to basic­ally bull­shit thou­sands of TV view­ers? But then they’re the chan­nel that came up with Turf Wars so their decision to con­coct House Hunters makes per­fect sense. After all, if you’re going to actu­ally go to the expense, time and effort to pro­duce a pro­gramme about lawns, fak­ing a house-hunting show seems like the best idea in the world. But it does make you won­der what other pro­grammes are faked… not that you have to won­der about any­thing on the exec­rable E! Net­work.