Home help

JAMIE and Charlotte have recently discovered an alarming slope in the first floor of their Edwardian home in the Leicestershire village of Narborough.

They’re worried the property could be tilting to the point of collapse. Quick, someone call Sarah Beeny. Her show Help! My House Is Falling Down might come to the rescue.

She also needs to know that the roof is leaking and black mould is growing on the walls. Didn’t these people have a survey before buying the place?

Thanks to subsidence, there’s a serious case of roof spread which is slowly taking the supporting walls with it.

With a dwindling budget, the couple are seriously concerned about running out of cash to fix their problems, so thank goodness for Beeny who comes up with a series of welcome tips and treatments.

For her, the most memorable episode of this second series concerns a timberframed house which has been passed down through the generations of one family.

“It’s got terrible death watch beetle in it. Eroded timber is not structurally brilliant,”

she says.

Obviously, money problems have affected homeowners, but unlike some property shows, which are a result of watching the pennies, Beeny doesn’t think her show is led by a disastrous economy.

“I don’t think the recession has anything to do with this series really,” she says.

“These are people who buy homes, ignore the problems, which get bigger and bigger, and then they kind of wake up going, ‘Oh my God. How did that happen?’”

"A SORT of young Viking, very blond and strong and very handsome... everybody’s heartthrob.”

Who could Lady Kennard have been describing? A film star perhaps, or maybe an international playboy? Well, not exactly. She was speaking of her cousin, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.

He was born to Prince Andrew of Greece and his wife Alice, in Corfu, on June 10, 1921 – a time of political uncertainty.

The family was forced to flee the island when he was 18 months old following the Greek military’s takeover of the country.

A few years later, Philip’s mother and father split up, leaving the youngster under the wing of his uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Philip first met Princess Elizabeth when she was 13, and was instantly smitten. The couple eventually married in 1947, six years before she became Queen.

ITV got in first with their 90th birthday tribute the other week. Now it’s the BBC’s turn. In The Duke At 90, Fiona Bruce is given the task of trying to get him to talk about himself without, of course, giving away any royal secrets.

IN Emergency Bikers, biker paramedic Mark has an eventful night as he deals with an aggressive drunk in Birmingham’s city centre and a young woman who’s had several epileptic seizures and is struggling to remember her basic personal details.

Meanwhile, over in Essex, the biker cops are on a special night operation, looking to crack down on uninsured vehicles and unlicensed drivers. And paramedic Steve tends to a pregnant woman in extreme pain, while Oxford paramedics are called to an elderly lady who’s suffered a serious fall.