DO you love thy neighbours? You probably don’t even know who they are.

The people of Grassington love theirs, but will they have the same affection for the winners of this reality TV programme who will become the owners of a cottage in the pretty Yorkshire Dales village.

Those aware of the ’70s sitcom of the same title will know that it featured lots of jokes about a black family on the street (incredibly, you can buy a DVD of this at a certain fair-to-middling high-street stockist of various forms of entertainment).

I think the residents here knew what they were in for when they learned of the name of this programme — and they were right.

Every week two couples compete against each other for the right to progress to the next round — the residents get to vote for their favourite — and in week one we had Birmingham plasterer/ decorator etc Steve and wife Nicky and her, yes villagers, that’s HER, kids, and trainee Tory MP Philip and his wife Simone and family.

Obviously, to make the programme interesting they had to go for every minority group possible in an attempt to weed out the prejudices of the locals. Next episode there’s a lesbian couple, this week Philip and Simone are black. It doesn’t take long before one man says his children have never seen a black person before, while another presumably hurls an insult at the couple — the sound was muffled and his face pixellated, so difficult to tell.

There’s a lot of peering from behind curtains and talk of how “certain types” might fit in, and the whole thing, ably narrated by Richard Bacon, has a “you wouldn’t get this sort of thing in London, you know” feel about it.

To be fair to the makers, this would have been as dull as a Manchester derby had they just focused on right-thinking people saying “I only see the person within, not the colour”, so the extremists got their say and, I think, the village came out okay.

There were prejudices but it was hardly Rangers-Celtic and if you look not very hard you will find similar views in Bolton, Manchester and, yes, incredibly, the sophisticated streets of race and culture-tolerant London.

Once you’ve got to know the locals over the next few weeks, this could become quite interesting and, for the record, Simone and Margaret Thatcher-book-wielding Philip won, in spite of the supposed feelings of a minority.

The best comment came from the bloke who said he would rather vote for a killer on the grounds that Philip was a Tory.

One last point: how annoyed would you be if you couldn’t afford to buy a place in the village in which you were born and someone won one simply by appearing in a TV programme? I know the answer.

My neighbours are fine, by the way.