Beneath the builders’ banter, DIY SOS has a heart of gold
TWIDDLING his moustache and sporting a construction helmet adorned with piratical skulls, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen bustles around the building site on DIY SOS: The Big Build (BBC1) like an overweight Captain Hook.
The dandyish interior designer once renowned for his frilly cuffs is now more comfortable in a vampirish leather overcoat that appears to be made from the entire hides of two bulls.
That corpulent Dracula touch isn’t lost on presenter Nick Knowles, who calls Laurence by his initials and claims that when ‘ Ell- Ell- Bee’ stands beside a window pane, there’s no reflection in the double glazing.
Ell-Ell-Bee is happy to play up to it. ‘Do you feel the chill when I’m in the room?’ he asks.
The constant banter on this show can become wearing. Nick and his team of hod-carriers, chippies and sparks are either ribbing each other mercilessly or flinging themselves into big manly hugs.
Most of the mockery this time was aimed at Nick’s shaggy barnet. He must have taken it to heart because, although his squad had just nine days to convert a family semi-detached for a chronically ill young woman, he made time for a haircut. A dab of hair gel did help tidy him up, but he still looked like a bloodhound with a hangover, and his mates let him know it.
For all its masculine swagger, the best episodes of DIY SOS, like this one, are as emotional and moving as anything on television. When the leg-pulling stops, the tear-jerking starts.
Chloe, the 20-year-old confined to one room downstairs by a rare genetic disorder that left her partly paralysed, was in desperate need of help. She couldn’t reach her own bathroom and had to use her grandmother’s wet-room shower, an hour’s drive away.
Little wonder that her devoted mother, Susie, had suffered a breakdown from exhaustion.
The generosity of the local community in their Warwickshire village was unfeigned. DIY SOS does gloss over the months of preparation that go into each show, the planning applications and the safety checks.
But some things cannot be faked. The dozens of family friends, neighbours and old school chums who turned up and mucked in really did want to help, and were glad to find ways that they could. And when Chloe, overjoyed at the transformation of her home, read a poem of thanks to her army of supporters arrayed on the new front drive, there were men weeping openly.
Some emotions are too strong to be hidden behind banter.
The emotional connection was missing from Dr Gabriel Weston’s accounts of rare diseases in Incredible Medicine (BBC2). Some of the illnesses were horribly sad, such as the young woman whose left arm would not stop growing, but each case study was presented in isolation, in a coldly clinical way.
Without a narrative to connect the stories, the human element was lost. Here was a girl who seemed immune to her own sickle cell disease, while here was a woman with two wombs, and next came a perfume connoisseur who lost her sense of smell — nothing linked them except their oddity.
With more thought, and a shot of the compassion that was coldly absent, this series could have presented interlinked stories to show how no scientific discovery happens in isolation.
Instead, we got a random selection of medical rareties that veered dangerously close to becoming a carnival freakshow. At least the builders’ banter revealed a little bit of heart.