A woman of property

SARAH Beeny went to a dinner party and ended up as a television presenter. Four million viewers now hang on her every sensible word in Channel 4's Property Ladder. They probably hang on her frown too.

The frown comes out each week as Sarah expresses her disappointment when the would-be property developers completely ignore her advice.

The programme's format seems to snap with a modern obsession for all things property. People who fancy their chances as developers buy a house, do it up and put it on the market, rubbing their hands in anticipation of a whopping profit.

Property Ladder encompasses our interests in money, property and watching someone else fail. This last aspect is probably not very nice, but there you have it. Most viewers secretly keep their fingers crossed, hoping the upstart developers will come a cropper.

Often, annoyingly, they don't and instead turn in a handsome profit. Even when this happens, Sarah is on hand - concerned brow at the ready - to pour on a little cold water, pointing out that the market had risen and the house would have gone up in value even if the developers had left it damp and deserted, instead of working themselves into a lather trying to make it look like something they once saw in a magazine.

But back to that mealtime meeting. "I met someone at a dinner party," says Sarah Beeny on an echoing mobile phone line from London. "He was doing a programme and it seemed to be about me."

Sarah had been working in property development with her brother, Diccon, and her boyfriend - now husband - Graham for seven years. The concept for Property Ladder was in place when she sat down at that dinner party. After a screen test, she got the job.

Property Ladder is now in its third series and each week Sarah, 31, has to bring out that frown. People just won't listen to her sage words. She laughs when this is put to her. In fact, she laughs a lot, in a husky, amused voice. So to save time, and the effort of typing "she laughed huskily", just take it for granted. Although she really does laugh when I expose her as a one-time gosling in Mother Goose, but we shall return to that.

As for the "contestants" ignoring her advice: "It seems to have evolved really... There are standard bits of advice. Set a reasonable budget in the first place but then each house has got slightly different issues."

In the first programme of the new series, shown last Tuesday, a man bought the top half of a house in Battersea, south London, intending to give it a hi-tech going over so it would end up like a loft apartment hidden inside a terrace house. It all went hellishly wrong and, anyway, the area wasn't up to it, says Sarah.

She sees no problem in transforming an ordinary terrace house into a modern dream.

"If that's want you want to do then you should definitely go for it. There are plenty of Victorian houses around so it won't be a loss. But in terms of the development, you will be ignoring your market."

As we speak, Sarah is in London, where she has been working on the Channel 4 morning show Rise, reviewing TV. She lives in Yorkshire with her husband and her cats in "not a particularly amazing house, more shabby without the chic". She won't say exactly where because she "doesn't like to talk about home".

She moved to Yorkshire three years ago, at around "the same time that the telly started". It seemed like a good idea because she loves Yorkshire and thought the television programme would only last a year. She thought the same thing the following year. And now, another year and another series on, she's still dashing about, spending more time in the south than she would wish.

"I do just love our life in Yorkshire, our house, our friends," she says. And she is thrilled with working on TV too.

"The only difficulty is that although I love meeting people, and I'm lucky to be meeting all these interesting people, the trouble is all the travelling."

She is on the road all the time, driving between shoots. "It's hard. I love living in Yorkshire but I get up at five in the morning and return at midnight."

A little, I suggest, like being a rock star on the road. "Yes," she says, doing the laughing thing again. She draws a self-mocking comparison with Jennifer Lopez. "She's an 'A' and I'm a 'Y' or 'Z'. But when you read these things about how demanding she is, how she wants the whole hotel suite where's she staying for three months painted magnolia, I can understand that. If I were in her position, I'd do that."

Property Ladder attracts four million viewers, which is a lot for a mid-evening programme about doing up houses.

"I think there's a bit of everyone that thinks it would be nice to be a property developer. The sensible ones don't do it," says Sarah.

"For a lot of people the idea of developing a single property is their dream. People aged 30 to 45 who have found the place where they want to live and want to turn it into their dream home."

Sarah is recognised more these days. "Yes, people do come up to me and they are all terribly nice, apart from one person. But most of them say how much they enjoy the programme."

Sarah still runs the property and development company with her husband and brother. And she is hands on when she has to be. "I can't get out of it," she says. But she's not one for doing DIY all the time. "If somebody said 'Here's some sandpaper', I wouldn't look round for a wall to rub it with."

Sarah doesn't believe her TV career will last. "It won't will it?" she says, not sounding concerned.

So that's Sarah Beeny, property developer, TV presenter and one-time gosling in Mother Goose at the Victoria Hall, Hartley Wintney, near Reading, from January 17-26, 1980.

I discovered this information on the Internet, where there were also a few rather rude looking Sarah Beeny sites I didn't feel I could enter. Just use your imagination. You'll get the idea.

She laughs down the phone again. Yes, that was her. How amazing that someone should have put the programme for Mother Goose on the Internet. "They must have been bored or something," she says.

It was her first and, as far as she can recall, only stage performance. "It was tied in with my ballet lessons.

"The whole class had to be geese in the local am dram."

Her brother was in it too, as a demon thief. Demon thief to property developer... no... well, perhaps we shouldn't go there.

Updated: 10:06 Tuesday, November 18, 2003