Amanda surprises while Cillian takes home prize

Home Of The Year RTÉ One, Tuesday

Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon BBC1, Tuesday

Operation Transformation

RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9.35pm

The British Academy Film A wards BBC1, Sunday

AMIRACLE happened on Tuesday night on RTÉ One. Home of the Year judge Amanda Bone is infamous for her love of the clinical. As I’ve said before, if you led her blindfolded into an operating theatre, all white walls, stainless steel, bright white light, and then let her open her eyes, she definitely would give it a ten.

Amanda hates a lot of things. Wicker chairs. Clutter. Too much colour. Things, in other words, that make other people feel they have turned the bricks and mortar of a house into a warm, welcoming family home. So when she and fellow judges Hugh Wallace and Sara Cosgrove arrived to a converted old schoolhouse in west Cork this week, I feared for its safety.

The owners were an artist and his wife, and the house was full of upcycled furniture, and throws and cushions that didn’t match. The studio where he paints was, like all artists’ studios, a mess, with tubes and splatters of paint everywhere, the very antithesis of what Amanda usually likes. Instead, she went into some sort of rapture and confessed she wanted to cry. I still wasn’t prepared for what came next, though. She gave it a ten out of ten. Yes, Amanda Bone, whose ideal home would be a Swiss clinic, gave a ten to a cluttered schoolhouse with oodles of peeling charm. Amazing.

Elsewhere, a Dublin couple showed off their extended house, which was marked down because of the master suite. It effectively was a bathroom and bedroom in one, with a glass shower cubicle acting as a divider. It brought back a chilling memory. In 2009, my sister and I got last minute tickets for the Heineken Cup final between Leinster and Leicester in Edinburgh.

With little choice in the matter, we had to share what was pretty much was the last available room in the city. When we walked into the bedroom, we froze. The bath, shower, toilet and sink all were in a glass box in a corner. How we got through our stay there, I’ll never know – all I remember is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to the corridor. Even with an intimate partner, I cannot see the attraction of this arrangement for anyone. Fun time once a month isn’t really a reward for what you’d have to look at the other 30 days. Give me a door and privacy any day.

At least all the houses being filmed for Home of the Year are tidy.

On Sort Your Life Out With Stacey Solomon on BBC1, we entered the two-storey-over-basement home of widower Craig and his two adorable young daughters, and they frankly might just as well have lived in a skip. There were mountains of stuff everywhere, including around £1,000 of magazines ordered on subscription, and never even taken out of the cellophane.

What followed was heartbreaking. Craig clearly had not got over his young wife’s death from cancer, and while the children were very well-adjusted, you’d need a heart of stone not to shed a tear when one of them asked to be filmed, and started telling her mother she was with Stacey Solomon.

The premise of the show is that every last things in the house is removed and laid out in rows within squares outlined on a warehouse floor, to represent each available room. The object is to take only half back, while the rest is sold or recycled. In the meantime, a small team is painting and making extra storage, so that when the good stuff returns, it has a permanent home.

It all worked out beautifully for Craig, but the real emotional punch came at the end. The late mother had written stories for her children, and the producers had them illustrated and made into a proper book. Judging by the response on social media, it seemed all of Britain and Ireland were in floods of tears.

In other hands, this could be a judgemental and exploitative show, along the lines of Kim and Aggie years ago. Its great strength is that Solomon is such a warm, considerate woman whose only ambition is to help, not berate. It is inspirational too. Every day since, I have looked at things that were idly lying around and put them back where they belong. That may not last long, but it’s a start.

I never got into this year’s Operation Transformation, so when I chanced upon Wednesday night’s finale on RTÉ One, and the reveal of all the weight loss and the subsequent makeovers, I was delighted to see that the five leaders had lost sensible amounts of weight, and not some of the huge numbers of previous years.

Nor did it seem to have been as emotional as usual, for which much thanks, because I’ve always been a little wary about close-ups of people clearly wrestling with issues that go beyond weight. Perhaps that happened in previous episodes, but on this final show, the message was a positive one about mental health, not calories, and that can only be a good thing.

Finally, the best moment of the week came when Cillian Murphy won the Best Actor Bafta for his role in Oppenheimer. His slight gaucheness makes him seem very much an everyman with no airs or graces, and I was delighted for him. Not so much about the show, though. David Tennant was his genial self, but you’d miss a few barbs lobbed at celebrities to puncture their pomposity, while an interval act of some man with a Peewee Herman voice conducting a pretend motivational speech was excruciatingly unfunny.

Fake as they might be with their cultivated smarm and their thanks to the Lord and all his angels, give me the Oscars any day.

Home Of The Year

Amanda Bone did something nobody ever would have expected

Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon

Stacey is a host that really seems to care for people

The British Academy Film Awards

Cillian brought authenticity to a tedious, pomp-filled ceremony