Ch4. - How to Save £1000 Online (2019)

As a nation, we spend £70 billion every year buying stuff over the internet. My wife, I estimate, is responsible for about half of this. If our WiFi went down, Amazon would be issuing a profit warning within weeks. Our postman walks with a notable stoop, while the streets for miles around are clogged with courier vans and delivery trucks in a state of perpetual logjam. I think she’s probably been invited to dinner with Jeff Bezos.

This programme sees presenters Sabrina Grant and Helen Skelton each working with a different family to see if they can make savings on their internet outgoings that would total £1000 if spread over a year. In our house, that would be easy. Just confiscate my wife’s phone and iPad for half an hour. It wouldn’t make good telly, but by crikey it would make me happy!

Anyway, first up, Sabrina is off to meet the Lawrence family from Bristol. When we meet them, they’re all playing frisbee together in the park. I’m not buying it. You try asking a couple of teenagers and a twentysomething if they want to go for a game of frisbee in the park with their mum and see what reaction you get.

Anyway, it turns out, they’re all rather fond of internet shopping. Under the circumstances, this is no surprise. They’d have done a pretty poor research job to have produced a family who didn’t know what internet shopping was, for a programme about internet shopping. But they’re not, perhaps, the most savvy shoppers. Mum, for example, describes her method for booking flights on the web. “Whatever comes up first, that’s the link I go with.”

You don’t need to be a genius to work out that it might pay to look around a bit, and to compare prices for different airlines, and on different websites. But the tip that Sabrina comes up with is quite remarkable. Counter-intuitively, bulk-buying, in this instance, is bad. If you are booking flights for a group, it is often considerably cheaper to book the flights individually. This may also result in the added bonus of you not being able to sit anywhere near your family.

Next up it’s Helen, who’s in Glasgow with the Miller family. They’re all playing football together outside their house. Puh-lease. For once, could we not have a TV illustration of a family where we just see them all shouting at each other over dinner, or passive-aggressively ignoring each other and looking at their phones?

Anyway, here, too there is a remarkable internet-related saving that can be made. Apparently, prices of various goods can vary depending upon what else you have recently browsed for on the web. If you have been googling luxury hotels and yachts, you’ll be quoted a higher price for an identical item than if you’ve been searching for Aldi bargain loo roll. Big Brother really is watching you, and he’s trying to sell you a £20 shirt for £35.

The surprises keep coming. I won’t reveal them here, because then there would be no reason to watch the programme, and actually, it is a programme that’s worth a watch. The Machiavellian machinations that some organisations will implement in order to fleece us are astonishing, and any show that helps us to circumnavigate these methods has to be a good thing. There is, as is so often the case with these shows, a pseudo-competitive element to proceedings, where Helen and Sabrina are battling it pout to see who can save their family more money. Cue the scariest word in the English language – “banter”. But with the likeable presenters and rather sweet families thrown in, this show is not just useful and important, it’s actually rather good fun.