Watch out Chardonnay housebuilders' wives have moved in

Sharing a name with someone fictional or famous is a bore. I can say that with the certainty of someone who has heard far too many ‘Not tonight Josephines’. So I sympathise with Persimmon Homes’ chairman John White today, and I hope he wasn’t actually watching Channel 4 at 10 o’clock last night.

If he was, he would have seen his craggy-faced namesake thundering: “We’re building starter homes here for people to live in”.

It descended into farce after that. Various housebuilding escapades included: White jumping into a digger to demolish a building that was blocking development on his site; White’s ex-wife and her new younger replacement engaging in fisticuffs over their man outside White’s Cheshire mansion; talk of White’s son helping to save dad’s near-bankrupt business by “putting his house on the line” to build a tower (is that how Beetham does it?); and an enthusiastically energetic in-car quickie by two characters whose names I neither know nor care.

Think Footballers Wives and you have pretty much got the idea of the new comedy drama Goldplated. For the sake of blogging for Building, I stuck with it for almost the whole of the first one-hour episode. But I don’t want to do it again. Even the frocks were naff.