As a million or more TV breakfasts balanced on a nation of knees so the second day of ITV’s much hyped Daybreak was rattling through this morning, carried largely by the nation’s favourite celibate couple, Christine Bleakley and Adrian Chiles. Both were looking flush, I thought, with the  millions ITV paid them to jump ship from the BBC’s quirky evening magazine programme The One Show.

But I don’t think Daybreak’s bleary-eyed audience will get the duo’s brand of early-evening humour and the allure of The One Show was its thought-provoking magazine-style features. But let’s give them a chance to blossom and develop.

Nevertheless one thing I can’t let pass was their report from Spain about the property market which, rather glumly, the show’s reporter said is now more Holiday Homes from Hell than A Place in the Sun.

Daybreak’s report chose its angle carefully and focused only on the most vulnerable of the British who moved to Spain, the ones who were always going to need an earned income to survive and who have been hit hard by the downturn.

The first to arrive in Spain during during the late 1950s were adventurous, well-off and usually bohemian home buyers but it wasn’t until Spain turned into the favoured holiday destination for millions of us that owning property on the Costas became a mainstream, discuss-down-the-pub type habit.

But the problems began when the most vulnerable started to move south; the ones interviewed on Daybreak this morning. These are the expats who retired early or moved their young families to Spain in the belief that they’d find jobs despite not speaking the lingo, having much money or possessing the skills needed to make a living on the Costas.

Each story has its own idiosyncrasies and some people have just been unlucky but it’s these type of ex-pats who are the ones moving back home in droves. The type of work they once relied on to keep them in paella and patatas bravas are now scarce – both the tourism and property markets are struggling to survive the recession and these were the traditional areas for unskilled Brits to find a job.

But one thing Daybreak didn’t mention is the 150,000 or more retirees who live in Spain and who – a NatWest bank survey revealed last week – are doing just fine.

The bank revealed that seven out of ten retired Britons living overseas were happy with their new country, and that one in five – or 20% – had returned back to the UK. I wonder if Adrian and Christine will get round to interviewing them?

emigration, properties in Spain, retirement, Spain, spanish property

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Spain, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.