It is a  British tradition to gripe that a terrible plague of property shows is ravaging television. But it's plain silly to point the finger at these programmes for puffing up the property market, forcing people into taking out massive mortgages or into negative equity. Blaming such shows and their presenters for the present uncertain state of the property market is akin to blaming TV chefs for the great bulge in obesity. Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the rest recommend healthy eating and responsible shopping - yet many people ignore their advice and binge recklessly. Likewise, I hope that I give sound advice rather than inveigling viewers into “get rich quick” schemes.

It’s a complex piece of drama, too; each twist and turn of the plot reflecting the players in a slightly different light; a whodunit in which few of us are wholly certain of the ‘it’, let alone the ‘who’.

Newcomers to the genre make the mistake of leaping to conclusions. Remember – the first suspect’s ultimately rarely guilty. The villains don’t wear black anymore, or ride the black horses.

Location, Location, Location, asking for a review of stamp duty, a tax that without doubt has contributed to the drop in the number of house sales.

That estate agents are losing their jobs is gleefully viewed by many people as the silver lining in the cloud of doom that hangs over Britain. But remember this: - we are all slaving down the mine and estate agents are the canaries. They are closing down because so few of us are actually moving. And when we stop moving, we stop buying things.

If we are to blame the market then "Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, must be the main villain for allowing cheap credit for so long and creating a climate where people imagined debt was risk-free. The most important virtue now is not to panic. There is a climate of fear and we spend a lot of time reassuring clients that their deposits with British banks are safe."

"The villain is the American personal bankruptcy law which made it far too easy for people to post back the keys, while ring fencing all assets other than property and encouraged their consumers to over-extend themselves on such a massive scale.
"But I do not think we will see British borrowers dishonour their mortgages on the same scale as in America because there is still substantial stigma about bankruptcy here.