STANDING outside a tatty-looking ground floor flat, presenter Martin Roberts insists I remember the No1 rule of telly’s Homes Under The Hammer.
“Never, ever, ever look in the fridge!” says Martin, who has been with the hit daytime show since it began 20 years ago.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
In that time he has travelled half a million miles up and down the country with a film crew inspecting 2,000 properties that have been snapped up at auction.
The programme, watched by millions including A-list movie stars Meryl Streep and Mark Wahlberg across the Pond, charts how the buyers who bought homes under the hammer have transformed them.
After two decades, Martin is still bursting with enthusiasm to see even more houses — and the worse their repair the happier he is.
To mark the anniversary, The Sun became the first ever newspaper to be invited on a Homes Under The Hammer shoot.
Car horns toot and fans wave as Martin, 60, stands in a busy main street in Taunton, Somerset, waiting to be filmed going into a one-bedroom flat sold at a local auction for £73,500.
To my untrained eye, the property can only be described as . . . a dump.
But when Martin opens the door he sees only TV gold.
The walls are sticky and peeling, the carpets are the sort where you wipe your feet on the way out.
It is so bad Martin starts to cough from the dust caused by huge cobwebs dangling from the ceiling.
The bathroom door hangs off its hinges.
Poking his head inside, Martin turns to the camera and says: “That toilet is in my top ten worst loos of all time! It’s horrific.”
The living room, painted a hideous dark blue, leads to a tiny, extremely grotty kitchen, where I forget Martin’s warning and open the fridge to be overwhelmed by a smell I don’t think I will ever forget.
But Martin says the whiff is nothing compared to a house he went into where the owner had kept 39 cats in an upstairs room for ten years — and never once let them out.
Just then, the Taunton flat’s new owner, design and technology teacher Ben Higgs, arrives to tell Martin how he intends to spend £15,000 doing up the property in just three months.
Father-of-three Ben, 43, says he has already built his own house, but admits wife Emma has only seen pictures of this latest project.
Ben confesses: “I haven’t dared show her photos of that bathroom.”
Once filming is over, Martin says: “Although Ben has already built a brand new house he has never bought at auction, and he has taken on something that would scare the bejesus out of me.
“But he seems quite confident about it.
“I always think it is quite a brave move to appear on Homes Under The Hammer because everyone gets to see what you do.
“And if it doesn’t turn out to plan then you are doing your dirty washing in public.
“But that doesn’t seem to put people off.
“We actually had someone buy a property at auction just so they could be on the show.”
After meeting 2,000 buyers, Martin can spot the people who are likely to succeed and those who will fail in turning a profit from doing up a house they have bought cheaply.
‘39 cats were kept in an upstairs room’
Yet when the show launched no one knew that a programme about what happens to properties that go under the hammer at salerooms would last more than one series — let alone be a success two decades later.
Martin, who used to work on TV travel programme Wish You Were Here, and Lucy Alexander were chosen to present the first ever episode, which aired on November 17, 2003.
He recalls: “We went to Devon to meet a man wearing a fluffy red checked shirt who had bought a pet shop on the opposite side of the street to his own house.
“He wanted to build a bridge across the street to link the two properties, but I don’t think he got planning permission.”
Since then 1,475 episodes have been made and Martin has appeared in more than 1,000 of them.
All types of buildings — from an old ambulance station to an astrology shop and a water tower to a working men’s club
— have been turned into homes.
There are some properties Martin will never forget — like the house in Cumbria where the crew thought they had found a dead body.
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He recalls: “The director went into the house and came out absolutely ashen.
“She said, ‘There’s a dead body in the bed’.
“We thought, ‘Well that’s a first’. People leave furniture but not dead bodies.
“So we all tiptoed in to the bedroom and, sure enough, lying underneath a white sheet was a body.
“Then the body started snoring. When we nudged it an old guy sat bolt upright in bed and said, ‘Where’s my family?’
“There had been complications with the completion of the sale and on the morning we arrived to do our filming the family had left in such a rush they’d forgotten to take grandad with them.”
Martin is convinced some of the houses he filmed in were haunted.
He says: “Of the 2,000 properties we have featured there have only been a handful of times where we have all gone, ‘We need to get out of here, quick’.
“One property, in Warrington, Cheshire, looked like The Addams Family house.
“There were security cameras all over the place.
The director came out absolutely ashen. She said, ‘There’s a dead body in the bed’. We thought, ‘Well that’s a first’. People leave furniture …but not dead
Martin Roberts
bodies.
“We were interviewing in a bedroom and halfway through a light bulb fell out of the ceiling socket.
“But instead of landing where gravity should have taken it, the bulb fell down in an arc.
“The estate agent told us afterwards that the previous owner had died in the room we had been in and he had been paranoid about intruders, which is why he had all the security cameras.
“The dead man really didn’t like us being there. And he told us.”
In Stockport, Cheshire, Martin was brought to tears when he asked a woman why she had bought the house they were in.
He explains: “She said her mum had recently passed away and they used to watch Homes Under The Hammer together in the hospice.
“Before she died the mum had pointed at me on the telly and told her daughter, ‘When I die I’m going to leave you some money and I want you to do what this man is telling you to do’.
“And there we were in a house that she had bought with her mum’s inheritance.”
Clik here to view.
The BBC One weekday morning show now boasts five presenters and has built up a devoted following.
Many viewers also love the editors’ choice of music, which mirrors what is on the screen, such as shots of drainage matched to Going Underground by The Jam.
Martin says: “Meryl Streep is also fan and Mark Wahlberg said, ‘Gee I love that show’.
“Julie Walters once told me everyone watches it in their slippers.
“And somebody said Daniel Craig watched in his trailer while filming Skyfall.
“Recently Sir Paul McCartney said he enjoys watching Homes Under The Hammer.
“I love and appreciate everybody who watches but when you hear about the sort of celebrities who tune in it’s always a bit of a blast.”
To mark the anniversary, celebrity fans The One Show’sAlex Jones and designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen will join Martin and co-presenter Martel Maxwell for special episodes next Friday.
Martin has no intention of giving up any time soon.
He says: “Until my plumbing fails or I get cracks that can’t be repaired and I’m deemed unfit for renovation, I will carry on doing it.”
- Homes Under The Hammer airs weekdays at 11.15am on BBC One and is on iPlayer.
- The anniversary episodes will be shown at the earlier time of 10.15am on Friday November 17.
‘Piano hands’
A VIDEO of Martin on the show has become an internet sensation.
Martin Roberts Piano Hands has been viewed more than five million times.
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He says: “I have done two thousand interviews on the show and apparently, when I say, ‘So why did you buy this house?’ normally my first question, I do a downward movement with my hands.
“Somebody took the bits where I did this from around 50 episodes and put it all together.
“They uploaded it to YouTube then somebody else made it look like I’m playing a piano.
“It was brilliant and I was so touched that somebody would go to all that trouble.
“It went viral on the internet.
“There are worse things they could have picked out and repeated, I can tell you.”