When Phil Spencer arrived in Auckland last New Year’s Day to film yet another TV series, he got a ride from the airport through the empty streets to his Auckland rental. He turned on the television. On it was an episode of Location, Location, Location, the British property show he and Kirstie Allsopp have fronted since 2000. “It gave me a hell of a fright,” he tells the Listener.
“I am jet lagged. I am a long way from home. I’m here for a month all on my own, so feeling a bit weird. I check into my apartment, turn the telly on and there I was. That really gave me a shock.”
LLL is up to its 41st season and some 400 or so episodes. The pair’s renovation show Love It or List It – originally a Canadian format – is up to its ninth. Both have been prime-time fixtures on Antipodean TV for years, so there may be a high chance of encountering a rerun while visiting the colonies. Could he tell what year the episode came from?
“It’s not hard. It’s harder for Kirstie than it is for me. I lost my hair a long time ago, and I’ve got a lot of blue suits and a lot of grey suits. Some years I am thinner than others. Some years I am fatter than others …”
Like the strength of the British pound, how the Spencer-Allsopp shows have provided years of comfort viewing in this part of the world is just one of those mysteries. The pair’s playful rivalry is certainly entertaining – Spencer’s Instagram describes him as “Husband, Dad, TV Presenter & man that puts up with Kirstie Allsopp”. There’s a free geography lesson in every show and the people they are helping shift or persuading to renovate their old homes are mostly relatable and quickly forgotten.
And although the shows are about Brits making the biggest purchases of their lives and dealing with the mystifying and arcane rules of UK real estate – “if it was easy, there wouldn’t be a show in it” – it seems to translate. LLL now screens in some 70 countries and a few of those are doing their own version as well. TVNZ has a local adaptation in the works.
Ask Spencer how real his real estate reality show is really, and he’s unequivocal.
“It’s very real, very genuine and we make our television shows in a way that very little television, if any, certainly in the UK, is made. When the house hunters see the house for the first time, that is genuinely the first time they’ve seen it. That’s the joy of working on it and watching it – sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it doesn’t.
“Kirstie and I were really clear about that right from the very first series, because we had businesses and [house-hunting for clients] is what we did for a living.
“In the first couple of years, there was a bit of pressure from the production company and from the channel to get the deal done, get the champagne moment. But if we’re going to save someone, five grand, 10 grand, 25 grand by not doing the deal today and stringing out negotiations … they’ve come to us for help. So, we have got to help them. Channel Four pretty quickly realised the genuineness of the process.”
When he started out, how long did he give it? “The honest answer is a weekend because we did a screen test and the producers said ‘Channel Four have asked us just to make a non-transmittable pilot.’ We filmed that over the weekend so we could look after our clients during the week. And I thought that was it. I’d never worked in telly. I didn’t know what was going on.”
But once edited, somehow “three days of faffing about” made for an enjoyable show. “I was absolutely amazed.”
How long does he give it now? “I used to think if I stop enjoying it then I’ll just go back to the shop. Then somebody said to me, ‘Phil, you’ll always be that bloke off the telly who does the property.’ That’s true and I’m happy with that. I give it as long as people keep watching it.
“Genuinely, I appreciate it more now than I did even five years ago. I don’t really know why.”
Spencer trained as a surveyor, and started the house-finding company in 1996, which he juggled with his growing television work until it went into administration in 2009 in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. The company is still going but he’s no longer involved. He and Allsopp formed their own production company in 2010.
Spencer’s summer visit to these shores was for a new addition to his portfolio of solo shows, which have included Phil Spencer’s Perfect Home, Phil Spencer: Home Hero, Phil Spencer’s Stately Homes, and the latest, Great British Dog Walks with Phil Spencer.
NZ’s Best Homes with Phil Spencer is him getting a guided tour of 18 impressive pieces of domestic architecture. Judging by the first episode, the show may give the impression to viewers in the UK and elsewhere that, if we could afford it, we’d all like to live in sleek black bunkers by the beach, judging by Spencer’s viewings of forbidding abodes in Piha and Auckland’s East Coast Bays.
There’s also a seemingly money-is-no-object compound of adjoining barns in a luxury home enclave above Lake Wakatipu, which impresses the affable Spencer no end as he is shown around by its architect Francis Whitaker. It’s all rather aspirational.
“It’s probably slightly beyond aspiration because it’s way up there. These are off the charts, these houses, but it’s just as much about the lifestyles that these very unique homes enable the owners to live, as it is about the homes themselves.”
It’s sort of Grand Designs without the messy building thing.
“It’s not an architectural show. Kevin [McLeod] could wax lyrical and get really in depth about the architectural features. And that’s not me. I can admire them. But I’m not a kind of architectural snob. I’m not saying Kevin’s an architectural snob, but you can get really immersed in architecture if that’s your thing.”
And in the weeks he spent here filming – with occasional forays on to the nation’s fairways and fly-fishing rivers – was Spencer able to form an impression about the houses where the rest of us live?
“I’m not sure I have, no,” he says with a laugh.
New Zealand’s Best Homes with Phil Spencer: TVNZ 1 from Sunday, June 9, 7.30pm and TVNZ+. Kirstie and Phil’s Love It or List It: TVNZ 1, Thursdays, 7.30pm and TVNZ+.
