As if you ended up next to the wrong person at the bar, or sitting next to that one boring acquaintance during a dinner. That’s how it mostly feels, looking at House for Sale, the new program of Powned, the second episode of which was broadcast on NPO3 yesterday. You hear a life story that you already know instinctively; every so often you ask a question, mostly out of politeness. Every now and then you think: now it’s getting interesting. Only to be dragged down a dead end towards predictability.
The structure of House for Sale is simple: the editors check which striking houses are for sale on Funda and send a reporter to them. Personally, I mainly associate the housing site with stress and shameless asking prices that can make me despondent for days as a prospective buyer, but others seem to have an addictive hobby of Funda Watching. The program shows that you can indeed encounter crazy things. So far, all have passed in review: a knight-style house, one house consisting of three apartments and a glass garage – so that the owner can always look at his Ferrari.
Only: people with interesting houses are not necessarily interesting themselves. A couple with a serial killer-like Pinterest house – steel doors, herringbone parquet, fake fireplace – might as well come from a catalog. When the reporter notes that they do have a very ‘furnished’ house, the man says: ‘That’s a nice compliment.’ When she asks if they don’t mind if they don’t have anything unique, nothing special, they answer, “No.”
Behind the striking living situation of twins Retta and Jolanda – in the three-apartment house – there appears to be a municipal requirement about the layout of the plot. As a hairdresser Eddy, with a house that is somewhere between that of Gianni Versace and a house from Help my husband is a handymanWhen asked why the hell he has a mannequin in his shower, he replies, “Just for fun.”
Things get interesting here and there, for example, when the Pinterest couple’s wife confesses that she cleans the whole house at 1 a.m. every night, because she only needs to sleep for four hours. Or when Jolanda tells how she only wants to work since the death of her son, ‘because on holidays you have so much time to think’. But what programs like First Dates or Hello Goodbye succeeds – eliciting personal stories from a simple, universal setting – comes to House for Sale not quite off the ground.
When I look at Funda, I see a superficial representation of a nationwide problem: too much demand and too little supply for too much money; the housing crisis in website form. Somewhere you see at House for Sale the same on a personal level – the human drama that inevitably becomes attached to a house, reduced to a program that mainly revolves around voyeurism.