Worst House on the Street review: ‘Like every property expert on television, Stuart and Scarlette are extremely strict and laugh a lot at their own jokes’

So that’s what I thought Worst House on the Street was going to be about: bad housekeepers with damp stains on their ceilings, clogged showers and leaking gutters, being rescued and possibly tranquillised by a Stacey Solomon stand-in. I feel this is a rich seam.

But no. Worst House on the Street (Channel 4, Tuesday) is simply another property programme, because we desperately need one.

Maybe we should all move to Wales. Gav and Luke managed to get a pine chest of drawers stripped for just £25. They found a porcelain kitchen sink for £85. They bought their detached Victorian two-storey cottage for £305,000. All right, it is in Cardiff. But still.

When Worst House on the Street started, Gav and Luke, who are middle-aged, were engaged to be married, and also still living separately, with their respective mums. A common enough situation in these strange times.

Gav and Luke took their mums out to lunch — boy, those lads can eat — and their mums said that they’d miss them, but on the other hand they weren’t begging them to stay either. We’ve all been there.

So Gav and Luke meet the amazingly glamorous Douglas siblings, Stuart and Scarlette, who are property developers. Like every property expert on television, Stuart and Scarlette are extremely strict and laugh a lot at their own jokes. Scarlette wears a lot of red. Otherwise they seemed OK.

The cottage had not had any work done to it since the 1970s. In fact, the photos of its interior prior to purchase, as the estate agents say, showed a perfect 1970s decor. Gav and Luke kept a lot of the furniture, and then gutted the place.

Stuart and Scarlette arrived in Cardiff at a tense time in the renovation, and five weeks after it had begun. It started well but then disaster hit Gav and Luke. “It was like we struck gold, then we struck asbestos.”

Getting the asbestos removed cost them £10,000. That was a big hole in their £50,000 budget.

The only saving grace for Gav and Luke at this point was that they had their own mood board. On a computer. Scarlette was delighted. A mood board is a place where you put photographs of styles and colours that you like. One look at Gav and Luke’s luxurious mood board (although the smart money says that the mood board was mainly Gav’s) and you thought: “These guys haven’t a prayer”.

Scarlette kept on throwing in a lot of statistics about home buyers. Like, 40pc of house buyers say that the master bedroom persuaded them to actually buy the house. And that a downstairs loo adds 5pc to the purchase price of your house.

Turns out that knocking down the wall between the kitchen and the living room wasn’t the greatest of ideas because steel supports had to be brought in to hold up the ceiling

And this is where there was a bit of confusion. On the one hand, Gav and Luke were renovating the house so that they could be together, get married and stop living with their mums. On the other hand, the Douglases, and particularly Scarlette, kept going on about how the couple had to make a profit. The average price of a house on the street was just over £400,000. With their £305,000 purchase price and £50,000 renovation budget, Gav and Luke were sailing a bit close to this entirely artificial wind.

So they sanded a lot of floor and knocked down a wall which separated the kitchen from their living room. Scarlette had something to say about how much an open-plan living space adds to the value of a house, but we were all tired out at this stage.

Turns out that knocking down the wall between the kitchen and the living room wasn’t the greatest of ideas because steel supports had to be brought in to hold up the ceiling, which was quite expensive.

They’d already spent £13,000 on new windows and doors, which everyone agreed were lovely. And £7,000 on waste removal — and that was before they’d knocked down that internal wall.

At this point the cameras withdrew, leaving Gav shrouded in dust and Luke, who is a nurse, coming home tired from his shifts in the local hospital.

We were never told precisely what happened during that time. But it’s probably safe to say that Gav and Luke went shopping. When the cameras and the Douglases returned, 16 weeks after the renovation had started, the cottage was magazine perfect.

It was all rich colours and textured throws and modern light fittings. Outside there were hanging baskets. Inside the spend on the renovation now stood at £87,000.

Even the Douglases were impressed, and the neighbours were delighted. Scarlette said that local estate agents had valued the house at £445,000, which she regarded as a triumph. But Gav and Luke aren’t moving. They are starting to save for their wedding.