Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

I’ve given up telly – except for one show

The news and Succession are too unpleasant. Give me Bargain Hunt

When my mother was in her midnineties and on her way out, the one delight in her life was watching – and rewatching – The Sound of Music. She would sit quite close to her TV screen, nodding happily as Julie Andrews and the Von Trapp children strutted and warbled their stuff across the Salzburg hills for the umpteenth time. In her final year, my mother must have seen that film a thousand times.

I am a little alarmed to report that something similar is happening to me. I am hooked on a daytime TV show called Bargain Hunt. Do you know it? It’s been going since 2000, though I discovered it only during lockdown. The premise is simple: two teams of two people (the Reds and the Blues) have an hour at an antiques fair and a budget of £300. Each team is challenged to buy three items which they later sell at auction – hopefully for a profit, more often at a loss.

Why do I love it so? It’s 45 minutes of positivity, featuring everyday British people of every type and hue, assisted by a diverse array of antiques experts who know their stuff but don’t take themselves seriously.

It’s hosted by a series of mildly eccentric but superbly professional and unfailingly jolly presenters who all have day jobs as real-life auctioneers.

I like these experts so much that I have reached out to some of them via Twitter, and three of them – David Harper, Charles Hanson and Charlie Ross – have now become proper friends.

My wife and I no longer watch the news on TV – not ever. It’s repetitious and depressing. There’s been trouble in the Middle East since Biblical times. Prime Ministers have been on the ropes since before those stories started about Gladstone and his fallen women.

Pandemics have been an on-off plague for centuries. Climate change has been playing merry hell with the environment since the Ice Age. We don’t need a nightly dose of despair. When I turn on the telly, I want a lift. That’s why I abandoned Succession. I can see it’s well done, but it’s a struggle to keep up with the dialogue without subtitles, the bad language is relentless and the characters in the story are all irredeemably unpleasant. Who needs that? I don’t.

The only TV programme my wife and I now choose to watch – truly, the only programme – is Bargain Hunt. There are 60 series and coming up for 1,900 past episodes in the archive. Even if we live to be as old as my mother, Bargain Hunt will see us out.

Bargain Hunt is the only TV programme I watch. I do catch other TV programmes through being on them. Thanks to appearing on Celebrity Gogglebox, I get a smorgasbord of all that’s on offer on the box and I’m a regular on ITV’s This Morning, which I love because, like Bargain Hunt, it has a positive vibe. It also has a friendly green room where I get to meet whoever happens to be hot at the minute, whether it’s the winner of Strictly Come Dancing or Brian Cox, the star of Succession. I feel I’m in the swim without having to get wet.

I appear on a lot of TV quiz shows. I have won Pointless Celebrities three times – each time paired with a ‘celebrity’ of whom I hadn’t heard and who didn’t know who I was either. My most recent Pointless partner was Baga Chipz, 32, a star of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a sharp cookie and now a good friend.

Recording that episode, I met up with Robin Askwith, 71, the actor best remembered for his near-naked appearances in the saucy Confessions of… sex comedies back in the 1970s. Robin started out with ambitions to work in serious cinema, and when he found himself appearing in panto one year with Ian Botham, he wailed inwardly, ‘Has it come to this?’

The great director Lindsay Anderson, who had once been his mentor and cast him in two of his films (if… and Britannia Hospital), came to the panto and told Robin afterwards, ‘It was wonderful – pure Brecht.’ Robin said to me, ‘I have no idea what he meant, but it transformed how I felt completely.’

Valentine’s Day is coming. Will you be sending your best beloved a card or a well-phrased love note? Or even a poem by you that they have inspired? Talking to a group of young people about love letters a while ago, I didn’t get very far. One of the youngsters thought a love letter was a kind of contraceptive – a French letter post-Brexit. None had ever sent or received a real love letter.

‘How do you let someone know you feel about them?’ I asked. ‘Text them an emoji of a smiley face,’ suggested one young Juliet. ‘And if you really fancy them?’ ‘A smiley face with the tongue hanging out,’ said young Romeo.

Mercutio chipped in: ‘If you really, really fancy them, it’s got to be an aubergine. Everyone knows that.’

Reds don’t give me the blues: the red team on Bargain Hunt

Gyles’s memoir, Odd Boy Out, is published by Michael Joseph