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Location Location Location stalwarts Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp (Photo: Supplied)
Location Location Location stalwarts Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp (Photo: Supplied)

Pop CultureMarch 17, 2023

Location Location Location will never die

Location Location Location stalwarts Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp (Photo: Supplied)
Location Location Location stalwarts Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp (Photo: Supplied)

New Zealand simply can’t get enough of Kirstie and Phil. What is it about watching British people look at houses that keeps us coming back after so many years?

Location Location Location is one of television’s most unlikely comfort watches. It’s also one of the longest running, with property experts Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp having recently filmed their 38th season of the series that helps British house hunters find their next home. LLL returned to TVNZ1 this week, and with previous seasons consistently rating highly with New Zealand viewers, it seems we can’t get enough of watching strangers visit other strangers’ homes and then deciding not to buy them.

The dream team: Kirstie and Phil (Photo: Supplied)

What is it about our love affair with an overseas show that – in theory – should be one of the blandest things on television? Every episode of LLL is essentially the same: picky buyers can’t find a house, Kirstie and Phil try to help, and everyone ends up drinking in a beer garden. The properties they visit are ordinary and unremarkable, and sometimes after an hour of television, the buyers walk away without making an offer. It’s been a waste of all our time, and yet, we’re not even mad about it.

That’s because watching LLL is like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket and downing a comforting cup of tea. There’s solace in the show’s predictability, reassurance in its never-ending optimism. Every episode of LLL is a gentle journey of possibility, even if that possibility comes with a huge mortgage and a lifetime of debt. It’s a show about new beginnings, and it purrs with a confidence that no matter how big the challenge, Kirstie and Phil know exactly how to make their buyer’s dreams come true.

Phil helps two hopeful buyers negotiate an offer (Screengrab: YouTube)

LLL is selling a dream, but it’s not the sleek, elaborate fantasy of shows like Grand Designs or Selling Sunset. It’s the dream of ordinary people owning an ordinary home in an ordinary town. Kirstie and Phil’s buyers seek everything from a small one-bedroom flats to big budget family homes, and the show treats both searches with the same importance. Not every house is fancy, not every home a winner, but there’s a charm in the show’s simple, no-frills approach. Like a run down end-of-terrace with a weird shower jammed into a hallway, LLL never claims to be anything it’s not.

Kirstie and Phil are the show’s wow factor, breathing life into every episode with their easy, amiable chemistry and cheeky banter. They’re a constant in a world of change, and I won’t watch LLL Canada because it doesn’t have Kirstie telling people to knock through every kitchen wall or Phil hooning down a child’s slide in a stranger’s garden. Kirstie and Phil know their stuff, and they’re not afraid to politely suggest that everything their buyers have done to this point is wrong.

But that’s the thing: Kirstie and Phil are nearly always right. After 23 years of property matchmaking, they know how to persuade people to fall in love not with what they want, but what they need. And while the buyers traipse around Britain, LLL indulges our secret desire to nosy into other people’s homes and judge their taste in soft furnishings, all from the comfort of our own dodgy soft furnishings. LLL takes us into worlds filled with feature walls and steep stairs, to mysterious places like Tiverton and Darlington and the Home Counties. There are also a lot of “live, laugh, love” signs in Britain, which is an instant sold sign in my book.

Ultimately, LLL (live, laugh, love) celebrates finding somewhere to belong, and that’s why we keep coming back to it, season after season. It knows the housing market is bonkers and recognises how hard it is to buy a home, but it always delivers an hour of comforting, simple telly. It doesn’t matter that the show’s trusted formula is the equivalent of painting your walls magnolia white. In a world of loud, chaotic colour, sometimes a bit of magnolia is a good thing.

Photo: Supplied

Kirstie and Phil’s buyers are looking for the feels, which is exactly what us viewers are looking for, too. I watched four episodes of LLL back to back while writing this, and could easily watch another four. I found myself cheering on the husband and wife looking to move out of their in-laws, and welled up at the joy of the couple who unexpectedly found their perfect flat on their tiny budget. It had a garden, with a gate covered in ivy that led onto a park with sea views. “You’ve just blown my heart open,” the buyer said, weeping. It was the happy ending we’d all been looking for.

Location Location Location screens on Wednesday at 8.30pm on TVNZ 1 and streams on TVNZ+.

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It’s not a bird, but it is a plane and that is also the Sky Tower, in Microsoft Flight Simulator. (Photo: Microsoft, Design: Tina Tiller)
It’s not a bird, but it is a plane and that is also the Sky Tower, in Microsoft Flight Simulator. (Photo: Microsoft, Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureMarch 15, 2023

A morning playing Microsoft Flight Simulator with Richie McCaw

It’s not a bird, but it is a plane and that is also the Sky Tower, in Microsoft Flight Simulator. (Photo: Microsoft, Design: Tina Tiller)
It’s not a bird, but it is a plane and that is also the Sky Tower, in Microsoft Flight Simulator. (Photo: Microsoft, Design: Tina Tiller)

Microsoft Flight Simulator recently released an update with a focus on New Zealand locations. To test fly it, Sam Brooks and a former All Blacks captain took to the skies above Auckland.

“I went to the top of the Sky Tower and watched Richie McCaw land a plane on the Harbour Bridge” sounds less like something that actually happened to me and more like a phrase you might use to awaken a sleeper agent. It really did happen, though, just not how you’d imagine it.

A few weeks ago, I went to the top of the Sky Tower after an invitation to watch a demonstration of Microsoft Flight Simulator for the launch of a recent update focused on New Zealand. Richie McCaw, well-known for his rugby abilities and only slightly less well known for his flying skills, was in attendance, wearing the least necessary name tag in the room.

After a brief chat from the people who worked on the game, McCaw stepped up to play the game himself, watched by the assembled media and publicity team. McCaw apparently first started playing the simulator in 1995, arguably its heyday in the public eye, because he’d always wanted to fly. Since retiring from rugby, he’s made that dream a reality, so probably doesn’t have a lot of time to actually play Flight Simulator due to piloting real-life planes.

Watching him play Flight Simulator in front of us felt pretty surreal. Not just because watching an All Blacks legend play a video game is a surreal experience, even in the age of Twitch streamers, but because he was flying around a virtual Sky Tower, the very building we were all sitting inside. The graphics in the game are pretty great, but they shouldn’t be good enough to make me look outside to see if there would be a little plane flying around out there. Which is, of course, what I did.

A few minutes later, McCaw landed a Cessna 152 on the Harbour Bridge, to a polite round of applause. And because I was there already, I decided to have a go on the Simulator myself.

Pictured: Microsoft Flight Simulator being played at the top of the Sky Tower. Not pictured: Actual planes outside the Sky Tower. (Photo: Sam Brooks)

The continued success of Microsoft Flight Simulator is hard to overestimate. It is the longest running franchise Microsoft has ever had, at over 40 years, predating even Windows by three years. It is by far the highest selling flight simulator in the world, having clocked up over 21 million users by the start of the 21st century, and it currently has 10 million active players. Right now, players can fly through over 500 cities, rendered in glorious, near-photographic detail.

The latest update, which came out last month, has 62 points of interest for New Zealand, including Hobbiton and the Treaty of Waitangi grounds, and even includes smaller airports like Westport and Rotorua to take off and land at. Should you even want to fly through the Gorge River, you can do it. Beyond that, gamers can fly around Queenstown in a Guimbal G2 helicopter, Lake Benmore in a DG Aviation DG-1001E neo glider (an actual plane, believe it or not) and Auckland in the aforementioned Cessna 152. This is what I chose to do.

I need to preface this and say that I am not your standard fan of Microsoft Flight Simulator. The games I like are 80 hour long affairs with near incoherent plotlines, the flights I like tend to involve me drinking two glasses of wine and not being responsible for controlling the plane. The only simulator I’ve ever spent any real time playing is literally called The Sims.

Even so, there is something innately calming about getting behind the controls of Microsoft Flight Simulator. I did what I assume everybody does when they play Flight Simulator in their home city – I tried to find my house. It’s not a quick trip from the start of the discovery flight, but what surprised me most is how the Simulator splits the difference between being calming and being completely engaging. It forces you into a certain active stillness as you make your way to your destination. I make a beeline for the Sky Tower, close enough to my house. The PR person next to me commended my ability with the simulator, because apparently a lifetime of playing text-heavy RPGs has instilled a lack of movement in me as a gamer that can be mistaken for stillness.

My house looked pretty close to the real thing, though rendered in less photographic detail than say, the Sky Tower. I’m pretty glad about that, honestly. Home got boring after a while, so I asked if I could fly around Barcelona for a bit instead.

“The goal is that anybody who wants to fly can fly,” says Jorg Neumann, the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator. He’s a German man who speaks as enthusiastically about this game as any developer I’ve ever spoken to. “We open up aviation and what’s possible with it to a completely different set of people, and that’s a beautiful thing!”

Microsoft Flight Simulator is unique in gaming in that it really has no target demographic beyond people who have an interest in flying. If you look up at a plane in the sky and think, “I wonder what that’s like”, this game probably appeals to you. This lack of a target demo is especially thrilling for Neumann. “The emails that make me the most happy are when I get something saying ‘I’m an eight-year-old girl and I just learnt how to fly in Flight Simulator, I’m going to become a pilot’.”

“It shows that we’re making an impact on the real world.”

That the recent update focuses on New Zealand is also thrilling for Neumann, who came to the country in 2015 and fell in love with it. “Where I come from everybody wants to go to New Zealand, literally!”, he says. “A lot of people can’t afford it or their life doesn’t allow them to go for whatever reason, and now in Flight Simulator they can!” 

He spends a good few minutes of our interview raving about the usual aspects of New Zealand that people rave about (the green, the blue, the mountains, the sea, you know the drill). These are all rendered in the game with meticulous detail. If you want to see the country without hopping on a bus, train, or real plane, Flight Simulator is how you’d do it.

However, the thing that makes Neumann proudest is how the simulator changes people’s perspective when they play it; they get a completely different view of the world they live in. A city seen from the sky reminds you of its size, its scale. Auckland, in particular, finally feels like an actual supercity rather than an unplanned sprawl of suburbs and villages. It’s flattering in a way that the reality is not.

“You get a perspective change of your day-to-day problems when you go in the air,” he says. “That’s why I think the dream of flight has been around with us for so long. There’s a real joy from people when they simply just fly around.”

“It brings us all close. It brings us closer to the planet and it shows us where we are, and what we are.”

Microsoft Flight Simulator is available via GamePass on Xbox Series X.

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