It annoyed me rather a lot, as they analysed (often extremely arbitrary) local authority areas rather than sensible regions. So South Cambridgeshire, for instance, gets a high mark because the place that would drag it down (the City of Cambridge) is a separate local authority cut out of the middle of it, whilst the rural areas in Guildford borough get lumped together with the dump that is Guildford in the centre. No one in Surrey would rather live in Mole Valley or Epsom and Ewell than Guildford borough (as the property prices in the villages around Guildford can testify).
Their formula also seemed a little suspicious, as having a fantastic score in one area (open spaces in Ashford and lifestyle in Westminster, for instance) massively overbalanced rubbish scores in other areas (crime in Westminster and everything else in Ashford), whereas the true "best" place would surely be decent in all areas rather than rubbish in some and brilliant in others.
Likewise, some of the "worst" areas seemed to be dragged down really far by one particularly bad statistic (like crime in Nottingham and unemployment in several places), despite being okay or even really good (lifestyle in Nottingham) in other areas.
One might almost believe that they deliberately went after extremes to make the programme more entertaining, but that couldn't be the case.
