Are you sold on estate agents?

They may look professional, but in ITV's new comedy drama estate agents are "money mad snakes". Photograph: ITV

Tonight sees the first episode of Sold, a new ITV drama series "set in the dog-eat-dog world of estate agency". We're promised drama and comedy as the "unscrupulous staff" of fictional estate agency Colubrine's resort to dirty tricks to sell local properties. The characters are variously described as "snakes", "money mad", and "amoral", except one. Danny "is a rare breed: an estate agent with a heart".

In fact, almost all the usual clichés about estate agents appear to be in place. No doubt we'll see one of the characters bandying about the words "compact" and "bijou" as they show someone round a broom cupboard, while another stands surrounded by rattling pots and shaking pictures and uses the phrase "handy for public transport".

Real-life estate agents on TV tend to reinforce the image of the industry as full of people keen to make a fast buck. Last year's BBC documentary Whistleblower, for example, claimed agents had been lying to customers and faking signatures.

My own experience of estate agents - several years ago now - wasn't great. Most of those I dealt with were very keen to introduce me to their in-house mortgage broker and show me round places far beyond my budget, but less interested in listening to what I was really looking for.

One tried to show me round a place that I'd just heard someone make an asking-price offer on. But to call them snakes is probably overstating it, and perhaps the people who were paying their wages - the sellers - had a better experience.

That said, it's pretty clear we love to hate estate agents - but we keep using them, and the websites that offer to cut out the middlemen have never really taken off. So is the reality that they aren't as bad as we, and TV programme commissioners, like to make out, or is it more that we don't have a choice? Do your experiences suggest the ITV press office could be right when it says an estate agent with a heart is a rare breed?