It may be a low bar but one of the more entertaining programmes on TV at the moment is This Is My House (BBC1).
It's a hoot.
I dismissed it at first as complete froth but after four weeks I'm still watching, transfixed.
Presented by Stacey Dooley, each programme is filmed in a different but predictably large house.
The premise is very simple. Four contestants compete against one another to convince a group of celebrities that one of them is the owner of the house.
They are all given the same name as the genuine owner – for example, Fern 1, Fern 2, Fern 3 and Fern 4 – which itself is oddly amusing.
There are various stages in the process, the most cringe-worthy being the moment when each contestant has to sit with the owner's real but stony-faced partner and convince the watching celebrities that they are a genuine couple.
When the celebrities make their choice at the end of the programme there are two possible outcomes. Either they identify the real owner – in which case he or she wins £1,000 – or they pick the wrong person and that contestant walks away with the money instead.
It sounds terrible but somehow it works.
This week the programme was even more surreal (for me at least) because I recognised instantly one of the contestants. He’s a journalist who has interviewed me twice – once for Vice, the second time for a magazine called The Fence.
Neither interview was published but that probably says more about me than him.
I remembered enough about him though to know that he wasn’t the owner of the house which meant I only had three contestants to choose between (reducing the odds considerably) and at the end I got it right. But the celebrities didn't. They picked the one person I knew was lying!
Interestingly the creator of This Is My House is none other than Richard Bacon, the former Blue Peter and Five Live presenter.
Bacon took a huge risk when he left the BBC in 2014 and moved to LA but I read an interview with him this week and it appears to have worked out spectaculary well.
Five Live has never properly replaced him and it's one of the reasons the station lost me as a regular listener.
