Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
CAN WE FIX IT? YES WE CAN!
With 15 weddings cancelled, Dick Strawbridge and his wife Angel hit on the idea of a lockdown DIY show
Sucking the marrow out of the bones of life is the mantra intrepid and eccentric renovators Dick Strawbridge and Angel Adoree have followed for years. Since 2015 the couple have enthralled us after upping sticks from a two-bedroom flat in Essex and moving into a dilapidated 18th-century French chateau in the Pays de la Loire, which they bought for £280,000. They painstakingly transformed it into a family home, and wedding and holiday venue, in the Channel 4 series Escape To The Chateau.
There have been six series that have pulled in almost 3 million viewers per episode. And the spinoff Escape To The Chateau DIY, in which they advise Brits who’ve bought French manor houses, had the highest daytime ratings for a new launch in a decade.
Now their philosophy is seeing them through the Covid crisis. The can-do Strawbridges weren’t going to sit around their ballroom whining that they’d had to cancel 15 weddings due to coronavirus. They’ve seized on the surge in lockdown DIY to make new show Escape To The Chateau: Make Do And Mend, offering tips to families trying to solve DIY dilemmas using what they have to hand.
‘We’re never short of ideas. Sucking the marrow out of the bones of life. That’s us,’ laughs Dick, 60, a cheery former Army colonel, Celebrity Masterchef finalist, Scrapheap Challenge presenter and engineer.
The show capitalises on their DIY knowledge. ‘We’ve never said we’re experts,’ says Angel, 42. ‘But we give things a go. We get hundreds of emails a week asking, “What would you do with this? How did you do that?” In lockdown, the emails went through the roof.’
In this series, we see them filming themselves at the chateau, helping others make do and mend. ‘One family wanted to create a room from an air-raid shelter, so we made that space in our lounge to help design it,’ says Angel. ‘We advised people on how to strip doors, upgrade a drinks trolley, revive a Queen Anne chair and create a smoker for cheese with an old toolbox and Champagne crate.’
They’ve also written a book – A Year At The Chateau – about their original 2015 adventure, which is out later this year. On arriving, they found fly-infested bedrooms, turrets inhabited by bats, the wind rattling through windows and just one working toilet, which flushed into the moat. With a monumental effort they renovated the chateau in just nine months, ready for their unforgettable wedding there.
‘When we finished writing we thought, “Bloody hell!”’ says Dick. ‘On TV you see a bit, but not the sheer quantity of work. We were in tears remembering it all, and laughing hard at parts.’
The couple’s love for each other is as much a part of the original show’s success as the chateau. Speaking to them over Zoom, there’s butting in and roars of laughter. ‘We relived every nuance,’ says Angel. ‘And we’ve included letters we wrote to each other when Dick was away filming other shows.’
The overheads on a 45-room chateau are huge – £100,000 of roof work is pending and a similar sum is needed for windows and shutters. So the Strawbridges value manpower as a gift – when guests arrived for their wedding, they all rolled up their sleeves to make the chateau presentable.
‘In the book we talk for the first time about the Baglionis, who are key – we bought the chateau from them and they’re our neighbours,’ says Angel. ‘As a wedding present, they mowed the lawn with their tractors and helped lay the gravel. They’ve always been there for us.
‘But going to theirs for the first time was a baptism of fire – we met lots of people who owned chateaux. They’re a different set.’
‘We were like fish out of water,’ agrees Dick. ‘We’re in a chateau because it’s a dream to live in a castle. That is very different from people who were raised in one. We have to work to pay for it. We need every generation to keep it alive.’
Dick has two grown-up children from a previous marriage, and Angel’s parents live in a converted outbuilding at the chateau. But Dick and Angel’s kids, Dorothy, six, and Arthur, seven, have plans of their own. ‘Arthur wants to open a restaurant and Dorothy wants to raise her family in an outbuilding,’ says Angel, who won a £100,000 offer from Deborah Meaden and Theo Paphitis for her Vintage Patisserie idea, a café offering themed tea parties, on Dragons’ Den in 2010. That venture did not go ahead, but she now runs one at the chateau. It sounds like the Strawbridges are on to another winner with their new show. ‘We hope so,’ laughs Dick. ‘We have 50 shows’ worth of material!’
Lisa Sewards Escape To The Chateau: Make Do And Mend, Thu, 8pm, Channel 4.