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?

The Mercedes Benz Polo Challenge, hosted by the Bridgehampton Polo Club at Two Trees Farm, is a must-attend event on New York’s social calendar with Ralph Lauren, Brooke Shields, Chloe Sevigny, Christine Brinkley and Steven Spielberg all regular attendees. This year the event took place on 24th July and both Amber Rose and Kourtney Kardashian boosted the celebrity count.

But all this is now up for sale and for a lot less than two years ago when the property was first reported for sale. Back in 2008 Two Trees Farm was put on the market by owner and Brooklyn-based developer David Walentas for $95 million but the property is today for sale at $75 million.

Although this sounds like a lot for a polo farm despite the price reduction, Two Trees Farm offers both an idyllic and sought-after location and a lot of property.

It’s near Bridgehampton in the middle of Long Island’s most expensive patch of land, the seaside resort area of The Hamptons – a group of 24 villages and hamlets around the towns of Southampton and East Hampton. The area  is where America’s rich and famous like to own homes and current locals include Renée Zellweger and Nathan Lane.

Anyone considering buying Two Trees Farm, which was bought in 1993 by Mr Walentas for $2 million, has to be into horses. As well as two houses, an eight-unit apartment building (for grooms), pool and tennis court there are three barns, two indoor riding arenas and two polo fields.

The property is currently being sold via the New York office of Sotheby’s Realty International.

Primelocation is sponsoring this year’s  International Property Awards in association with Bloomberg Television, the housing world’s answer to the Oscars with a red carpet event to be held on November 25th and 26th this year in central London. 

So could your next home end up with an international gong for its architecture, build quality or a range of other categories?

These awards may not offer the same glamour and stars as the yearly Oscars in Hollywood, but in many ways they are not far off with categories that include best golf development, international property, apartment and interior design.

The event began it began in 1994 and has developed into a global concern with regional heats held across the world during the build up to the final in London. This comes to a glamorous climax at an event attended by the leading lights of the property world and celebrities.

These in past years have included Rick Wakeman of 1970s supergroup Yes, BBC Royal Correspondent Jenny Bond, interiors expert Linda Barker and Location, Location, Location star Phil Spencer. And the awards have high profile sponsors too. As well as Primelocation.com these include newspaper The New York Times, Google, Bloomberg Television and Maserati.

But one thing that doesn’t change is the robust judging process. Every year the world’s industry experts gather to judge - including this time round Primelocation.com’s Nigel Lewis - whether the hundreds of entries from across the globe pass the quality test.

A wide range of residential and commercial properties are judged from grand villas in Dubai to office developments in Budapest, and previous winners have included UK agent Knight Frank, developer Berkeley Homes (for its Sugar House development in London) and the Dunas Douradas Beach Club on Portugal’s Algarve coast. But winners come from a wide range of countries including Panama, Brazil, India, Singapore, South Africa and Cape Verde.

But despite these weak points resorts such as Monte Rei in Portugal (picture, above) are enormously popular with the club swinging crowd, lauded as the golf equivalent of the ski-in, ski-out chalet.

And for most it’s the brilliance of the golf that really matters – the devious dog legs, the angle of the greens, placing of the bunkers and length of the rough. If these are up to par then it’s time to look at the design of the houses, a resort’s location and its reputation.

So the Primelocation team has found a writer to rank them. He’s played many of the world’s best golf resorts and seen their properties, becaise Peter Swain (and his writer wife Cheryl Markosky) have spent many weekends away in recent years writing a column for the The Daily Telegraph, so who better to sift through the hundreds of golf resorts around the world and name the 20 best? Read the ample fruits of his efforts here.

There’s the local utility companies to deal with, the challenges of finding a reliable cleaner and gardener, footing unexpected repair bills and the often complicated local taxation regimes.

But one challenge that no one could predict is the mountain of weird or surprising items that holiday makers leave behind in rental properties overseas for landlords to clear up .

According to Owners Direct, one of the leading private holiday home rental websites, the items most often left behind are the ones you’d think holiday makers need to get home – money, passports, false teeth, vital medicines, travel documents and car and house keys.

But although leaving behind these essentials can have serious and  expensive consequences, other belongings left behind by holiday makers are obviously too embarrassing to take home or worth retrieving.

Items found by Owners Direct landlords in properties include a pair of Father Xmas trousers, a fake beard, a false leg, a bongo drum and a full sized rubber mask of George Bush.

And being a holiday home owner might appeal to those with a thirst for free alcohol – holiday makers regularly leave behind titanic caches of unconsumed booze rather than lug it all the way back home.

But perhaps the most surprising items left behind were the most generous. One owner said a customer of theirs replaced all the light bulbs in their property with low energy ones for free.

Waiting to sell (LtoR): Sophie and Rupert Scott with children Charlie, Ediir and Lulu outside their Cote d'Azur home.

If you have seen this summer’s blockbuster Inception then the haunting refrain of French cabaret singer Edith Piaf’s 1960 hit Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien will be familiar – it features several times in the film and was a ‘prime source’ of inspiration for the film’s composer, Hans Zimmer.

But an English family living on France’s Cote d’Azur are hoping this higher profile for Piaf – who died in 1960 – will help them sell their luxurious home. The property, which has four-bedrooms, three guest suites, a two-bedroom cottage, swimming pool and tennis courts, is the former and final home of the gifted but tragic singer.

Although this traditional, stone-built ‘bastide’ may have once echoed to the distinctive timbre of Piaf’s voice and despite owners Rupert and Sophie Scott reducing its price by €250,000 – Les Parretts has yet to find a buyer.

Piaf – real name Edith Gassion – owned the property for several decades until her death in 1963 from liver cancer. But for the Scotts it has been a shorter Vie en Rose in the hills overlooking Nice.

The couple, who’ve lived in the South of France for six years and have three children, are hoping to move back to Britain before the oldest starts at Millfield School in September.

During their tenure the family have been busy. As well as upgrading and redesigning the garden Rupert and Sophie have revamped the roof, eradicated damp throughout and re-arranged the oldest, central part of the property to include a farmhouse-style kitchen, sitting room and study.

But despite all this, their stunningly beautiful home remains unsold and the Scotts recently reduced their asking price to €8.5 million to reflect a local market that, local agents say, is quiet at the moment.

If you are interested in buying the property then contact agent  Savills or telephone 020 7016 3740.

If the walls could talk, I wonder what they would say. But is this chance to buy a piece of Hollywood history just a little bit  morbid?

For Monroe fans looking for a home with happier memories, there are two other properties that might better fit the bill:

1. Marilyn’s former holiday home in Palm Springs is also up for sale. Another Med-inspired property, it looks made for entertaining (thanks to the huge patio area) and relaxing (thanks to the pool), it’s on the market for $1.4  million and comes with five bedrooms, five bathrooms and mountain views.

2. This New York apartment building was Marilyn’s home with Arthur Miller between 1955 and 1956, and it’s said they were even married in this very apartment. With neo-classical detail and cityscape views, the building was designed by Emery Roth in 1938. The apartment in question is a two-bed, two-bath, on the market for £1,872,900.

But overseas the picture is very different. Except Australia, New Zealand, Cyprus and the US, which have up-to-date land registry systems like ours – and Spain, which has recently modernised and put its online – British owners of property overseas often have little idea which way prices are swinging.

French property for sale: Apartments within the Les Jardins d’Eos developing in the village of Veyrier du Lac near Annecy in France by developer MGM (0207 4940706). Prices start at €380,000 for a one-bedroom apartment.

France relies entirely on estate agents to provide this information, Greece has only recently emerged from the stone age house price wise, and in Portugal and Italy the systems are, at best, obscure.

But our latest figures for holiday homes overseas, produced by our sister site FindaProperty.com and featured in this weekend’s Sunday Times, give a snapshot of which way asking prices are rising or falling across the globe.

These figures give an interesting insight into how the global recession has affected property prices in sunnier climes. The biggest dips have been witnessed in Florida, which despite enjoying a brighter 12 months following an easing in the US recession, has nevertheless seen its property prices dip by 29% since 2008.

At No.2 is Cyprus, where prices have dropped by 27% since 2008 and continue to fall as the island’s banks and property market struggle to cope with a dramatic reduction in demand for both its mortgages and homes.

And at No.3 in the price drop league is France, where prices are now 22% lower than they were two years ago, followed by Bulgaria at 20% and Italy at 16%. Spain, whose downturn in asking prices began a year or more earlier than all the other markets has witnessed asking prices drop by a more modest 15% since 2008.

But it’s not all drops. Some countries where British buyers like to own homes have not witnessed such dramatic reductions and in some markets prices are up, not down.

Portugal has seen asking prices recover recently (+1.5% compared to 2008) and Turkey - which is outside the Eurozone and its faltering currency – has seen holiday home prices increase by 7%, the FindaProperty figures show.

In Canada, which is more of an emigration rather than holiday home hotspot, prices have risen by 10% and both New Zealand and Australia have endured only modest losses during the worst of the global downturn.

Vote in our poll on the state of the international property market:

Overall, a mixture of Irish, Scandinavian and British buyers make up the fast-expanding community of holiday home, retirement and investment property owners in Turkey, which has grown from approximately 73,000 in 2008 to 104,000 today.

British favourite: a villa in Turkey witha for sale sign outside

Most of the development along the country’s Aegean and Mediterranean coastline has taken place in Mugla province, which includes the holiday resorts of Bodrum, Marmaris and Fethiye, although other seaside hotspots gaining in popularity include Kalkan, Dalyan, and Alanya on the Mediterranean (or Turquoise) coast and Kusadasi which overlooks the Aegean.

Although agents often sing the praises of Turkey’s relatively unspoilt coastline and its deserted beaches (with the exception of Altinkum outside Didim, which at best could be called cheap and cheerful) it is in reality the extremely low property prices that attract most buyers.

Making a splash - the Seahorse Residence development near Didim.

Whereas £200,000 still buys you very little in Spain – despite a severe property crash in full swing on the Costas – in  Turkey £150,000 can secure you a substantial townhouse with sea views and £60,000 a two-bedroom apartment. Inland and away from the big resorts you can halve that.

For example there is the luxury hilltop residence of Royal Heights in Bodrum, where prices start at £97,592 and, further up the coast, the unusual but striking designs of the Seahorse Residence outside Altinkum where prices begin at £31,200.

But the biggest shot in the arm for Turkish was the recent relaxation of its once draconian mortgage rules. The Turkish used to have an almost obsessive desire to stop ‘foreigners’ (by which they meant Greeks) owning property in Turkey or taking out loans on property there.

But this culture of suspicion appears to have subsided now and mortgages of up to 70 per cent loan-to-value are now available to non-Turks.

“We have seen the Turkish property market go from strength to strength,” says Steven Worboys of Turkish agent Experience International, “and British buyers still make up a majority of foreigners buying property here”.

But before you get too excited by the numbers, remember that Turkey is still an emerging market when compared to Spain. Despite its difficulties some 500,000 Brits are said to own a property on Spain’s half-a-dozen Costas and nearly 16 million of us holidayed there last year.

A tree house built among oak trees in the Alpes de Haute-Provence region of France, four metres off the ground.

It appears the tree house is  becoming an increasingly popular  holiday home as land becomes scarcer across southern Europe. Once banished to the back garden as a plaything for children, they are now being dragged  into the mainstream by an innovative French firm.

To date the company, La Cabane Perchee, has built 220 tree houses in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal, each custom built to suit the tree that holds it and offering a realistic alternative to the traditional villa, townhouse and apartment holiday home.

An aboreal treat atop a pine tree in the countryside near Nice in France. It stands some 11 metres above the ground

Each wooden structure, which can be up to 15m off the ground, is built to ensure that the tree has room to grow and constructed without using nails. And if trees are scrace in your favoured location, then stilts are used instead.

And tree mansion would be a better word to describe some of the company’s creations and the larger ones are fully insulated, offer electric heating and bathrooms with toilets and showers. Prices start at €25,000 and one of the firm’s typical tree houses offers 15-18 sq m of floor space with an extra 10 sq m of terracing outside.

Photos:  Sipa Press / Rex Features