With that sullen pout, she should have gone, but she survives and seems to be prospering. A new series of Location, Location, Location begins this summer. While you wait, you can see repeats of old episodes on More4 three times a week. Just think of it, there are people who sit down three times a week and watch property programmes from six, seven or eight years ago, in which a tall couple need a flat with suitably high ceilings, or Kirstie and Phil settle disputes between a wife who wants a period house with a garden, and a husband who wants a new-build with a garage.

When I joined them, I realised that Allsopp had not driven her viewers half-mad by pushing them into the greed of turbo-consumerism.  She simply satisfied their curiosity about the private lives of others. If this is a moral failing, I share it. Only a small band of hard-core horticulturalists attends the meetings of my local gardening society. But when it holds its annual inspection of local gardens, scores of part-time gardeners who barely know one end of a hoe from another turn out to give the homes of our neighbours a thorough inspection, reflect on their taste or lack of it and wonder how they afforded the kitchen range.

Allsopp indulged our voyeurism but also offered sensible advice on the need to compromise and the dangers of buying on impulse. Appeals to naked greed were rare, and even when they occurred were far from sinister. What for instance do you make of this scene, when Kirstie and Phil took an unimpressed couple round a semi-derelict Edwardian home in Guildford at the height of the bubble? 

"Is there a price where this becomes interesting, say, £100,000?" asks Phil. 

"OK, we'd buy it at a hundred grand," said the sceptical wife.

"Would you buy it at 125?"

"No."

"Just supposing you did, supposing I did at 125 and I then spent 40-odd, what do you think it would be worth?"

"Couple of hundred easily."

"I'd have just made 40 grand."

"Tax free, tax free!" cries Kirstie in the background. 

"Just a thought," says Phil.

I suppose they were feeding the craving for unearned wealth which was driving the market. But, and let me put this tactfully, I speak from experience when I say that writers for the New Statesman do not always live in a state of contemptuous isolation from the materialist culture which surrounds them. While publicly deploring the "property porn" addiction of the masses, they are all too easily overwhelmed by mounting excitement when they close the curtains and ogle the rising prices of their own homes.

The Honourable Kirstie Allsopp will be on our screens long after they are forgotten because she talks to her audience without humbug. She realises it not only wants to know how the other half live, but their cost of living, what they can live with and what they cannot live without.