TV property gurus Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer pride themselves on being in touch, both with the housing market and the way people live.

They were thrust together as complete strangers on the set of the pilot episode of Location, Location, Location in 2000 and since then they have toured the country helping people of all incomes and backgrounds find their dream homes on Location, Location, Location and now Kirstie and Phil's Love It Or List It.

"We may not see the very bottom end of things but we do see people’s day-to-day struggle to make ends meet, pay the mortgage, get to work, create something for their children, pay the child care," she says.

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In Love It Or List It, which airs on TVNZ on Wednesdays at 7.30pm, Allsopp helps people who are desperate for more space to transform their homes, while Spencer looks for alternatives they can afford. "It’s a very topical show for where the market’s at and a debate people are having all over the country," says Spencer. "Shall we invest money in our house and stay, or is it better to go?"

Last year, Allsopp was really stung by the reaction to a tweet she made in which she agreed with someone else that it was "disgusting" to do the laundry in the same room as you make food.

"My life’s work is in part dedicated to getting washing machines out of the kitchen," she wrote, intending to signify to her 400,000 followers – and anyone else besides – that she was making a "fun" point to try and get a debate started.

Nothing unusual there: she has been a guest on Question Time and frequently used Twitter as a platform for headline-making views about issues from fertility treatment to the alleged evils of boarding schools. But this time, the reaction touched a nerve.

READ MORE: Kirstie Allsopp's 10 commandments

"What really upset me was the newspaper columnists – mostly women – going, "It just shows she’s completely out of touch.'"

It’s an easy claim to make of a baron’s daughter who lives in Notting Hill, London with a millionaire property developer, but she goes on the attack. "Actually, they are so London-centric they only think about places where the properties are so small you have no choice. I’m the one who goes across the whole of the nation and sees houses that are worth much less money and people who are earning much less money, and who actually knows people are desperate to get the washing machines out of the kitchen."

The last straw was a columnist who said she was a controversialist, deliberately winding people up. "I thought, f*** this, the last thing I am is a controversialist. I hate the idea of deliberately having an argument with someone about anything. I expressed a fun view, loads of people agreed, loads of people disagreed, which is fine. Bog off and stop trawling Twitter for imaginary bad news!"

So Allsopp announced she was giving up Twitter for good. How long did that last? "Six weeks. Probably eight weeks."

And she didn’t look at it at all during that time? "Of course I looked at it, you’d be mad not to look at Twitter, it’s about news. I’m a news junkie."

READ MORE: The one question sellers need to ask themselves

She did not tweet though and the silence felt more like a year, she says, because it happened in the middle of the great debate about equal pay, after the BBC revealed how much more it was paying to its male presenters than their female counterparts. So, do she and Phil get the same money?

"Absolutely. We have the same agent and I do a lot of the negotiating as well," says Allsopp, who is said to earn more than £400,000 a year from her TV work. Her screen partner tries to insist it’s only natural they get equal pay because they do the same job, but she interrupts. "Phil my love, you’re missing the wider point with this: we started in this together so we were both paid the same from the outset. If we were two women, would we have been paid so well? I don’t know."

Spencer frowns and says he thinks they would but Allsopp is having none of it. "I asked a few female friends of mine in the business what they were paid and I was absolutely staggered. I remember being in a car with a famous TV presenter who got a call from her agent with a job and told me her standard day rate. I was like, 'What? You’re kidding me!'"

That’s because it was so much lower than her own. "I have always known that I am better paid because my wage was pegged from the beginning to that of a man."

Spencer is a big, manly presence in jeans, a navy pullover and burgundy shirt with his silvered hair cut close at the sides but almost gone on top. He is a year older than Kirstie, but she looks quite a bit younger than him in a black and white printed dress and wraparound bronze shawl.

When they first worked together they appeared to be an odd couple: the cheeky geezer Spencer, surveyor turned property developer, cast alongside a plummy Sloane Ranger type who specialised in finding nice new homes for super-rich chums.

"He thought I was mad. I thought he was gay," says Allsopp. "He’s camp as Christmas." Phil’s eyebrows go up. "I beg your pardon?"

Both were far smarter, funnier, more expert and far more likeable than the stereotypes suggested and they sparked off each other brilliantly on screen. So here comes the question that occurs to everyone who watches one of their shows and wonders at the chemistry between them. Have they ever hooked up?

"No,’ says Allsopp quickly. "No!"

Not even a quick snog? "No." She’s firm about that. "Absolutely not."

He looks a little hurt by this dismissal, but she pats his knee. "Sweetheart, it’s not because you’re not a very attractive person." Then she turns back to the question. "It’s just that to get drunk and wake up next to Phil would be like, Oh!" Allsopp gasps in mock horror.

"Also, neither of us are destructive people. We are both very family-minded, very constructive people and the idea of so violently destroying your personal and professional lives because you do one thing, one night… I mean, I can’t imagine."

Allsopp lives with her long-time partner Ben Andersen in London's Notting Hill with their two young sons, Oscar and Bay, and his two boys from a previous relationship. Spencer has recently moved to rural Hampshire with his Australian wife Fiona and their sons Jake and Ben.

"Also," says Allsopp, "Phil would die of guilt. He’s really not the type."

He nods enthusiastically, having already got together with Fiona before he met his co-host. "We’ve been friends for 17 years. That’s a very long time to be close to someone. If we ever had done anything, we wouldn’t be sat here today. It would have wrecked things. It’s never crossed either of our minds." They have become used to all the speculation over the years, though. "People tried to put us together at the beginning and when that didn’t work they tried to pull us apart and say we didn’t like each other at all."

That certainly doesn’t seem true. Both write books and make shows on their own but Spencer and Allsopp are at their absolute best when they’re together as a double act. One critic recently compared them to a loving older couple who have decided that gardening and companionship are better than sex. "That is really good," says Allsopp with a guffaw. "A very good description of us!"

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Spencer is originally from Rutland but he went to university in London, trained as a surveyor then set up his own property search company. Allsopp did not do a degree but worked at Christie’s – where her father was chairman – and her mother’s interior design company before striking out with a friend to find homes for the rich in London.

Location, Location, Location helped turn house buying into a national sport. Then came the financial crash and now we’re in a total mess, says Allsopp. "The system is bust. The whole purchasing system has broken down. Lawyers are much more risk-averse. Mortgage companies are much more risk-averse. Lending is much harder. So it’s more expensive to buy a house, people are less willing to do it, they are starting later – there’s more a sense that your 20s is a time for having fun, not for saving up to buy a house. And it’s harder. So the situation is pretty gloomy to be honest."

Attitudes have shifted dramatically, she says. "People have also changed in terms of what they want in their life. When I bought my first flat I was 21 years old, walking to work, making my own sandwich, having a pizza once a month on payday, not having any foreign holidays or a car – that all seemed totally fine in pursuit of home ownership. I was young and I could make those sacrifices."

Young people don’t want to do that any more, do they? "Someone got in a hell of a lot of trouble the other day for saying, 'If you didn’t have coffee or eat out for five years you could save up for the deposit…' But that just isn’t true in most cases. That wouldn’t be enough to save up for a deposit with the kinds of house prices we have now – or it would take them so long because the cost of living is so expensive."

Their show Love It Or List It brings couples together as they try to decide whether to move on or stay put. "There was a lovely couple in Yorkshire – she had moved into his house when they got together and it was not suitable for them any more, but he was absolutely not up for moving at all, under any circumstances," says Allsopp.

Every episode involves an architect drawing up plans for improvements to the home, although the couples themselves have to pay for all the work you see on screen. This isn’t DIY SOS. "It’s their money, we don’t put a penny in to it."

The man in Yorkshire eventually realised how much the idea of moving meant to his partner and that he loved her more than the house.

"I was crying. Phil was almost crying. They were crying. He said, 'I’ll move.' And she was like, 'No, I don’t need you to move now, because we’ve done this work and I understand more about you. I just needed you to say you would move for me.' It was so touching, as you really genuinely felt that this couple had moved forward in their relationship in a really positive way."

Spencer adds: "We make a show that genuinely helps people, it changes people’s lives, that’s a very satisfying place to work, particularly in the television world. But we’ve also got each other." He glances across at her with what looks very much like love, however platonic. "I don’t think we would have got this far without that."

Kirstie and Phil’s Love It Or List It airs on TVNZ on Wednesdays at 7.30pm.

This article was first published on the Daily Mail.


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