£100k doing up a horror of a house — and it’s still a fright!
TELLY is a cruel medium. Anyone who steps in front of a camera seems instantly five years older, ten pounds heavier and frequently heartless.
Property renovation shows can be especially cynical. Presenters barge in and criticise every feature from skirting to gables, before waltzing off — leaving owners to live with very expensive decisions.
George Clarke surely had a humanitarian duty, in Ugly House To Lovely House (C4), to step in and restrain the couple who wanted to spend their life savings on refurbishing the abject eyesore they called home.
Simon and Lisa planned to spend £100,000 turning their monstrosity into a slightly bigger monstrosity. It would be clad in charred cedar, with two extra rooms and bigger windows, but it would still be the architectural equivalent of gangrene.
To call their £360,000 ‘Dutch barn’ dormer bungalow in Gloucestershire a blot on the landscape would be libellous to blots everywhere. And it’s not as if the landscape was that great — George kept burbling about the fabulous views, but the house was surrounded by newbuild properties, while there was a radio mast in the adjoining field.
The neighbours hated the house: they called it The Amityville Hor- ror, because it looked haunted. You’d have to feel sorry for any poltergeists enduring the damp and the mould, and the heavy smell of the plastic conservatory. Even the architect who drew up new plans admitted: ‘It has windows like a nuclear bunker.’
The unkindest stroke was to take Simon and Lisa to see a much bigger and very elegant barn conversion that had been professionally dressed in silvery-black cedar. It looked seductively modern. It also looked like it had cost a fortune.
To pretend the couple could achieve the same effect themselves with a blowtorch and some planks on a wet afternoon was painfully unfair.
George did gently suggest that it might be easier and cheaper to demolish the house and build something else. But hints weren’t enough. His duty was to turn up at 5am with a wrecking ball, and level the place. Simon and Lisa would have thanked him for it eventually.
Instead, he consigned them to flounder with an impossible ambition. By the time their money had almost run out, the couple were left with the refurbished shell, a half-built extension, and holes where the windows should be.
Lisa was still upbeat. ‘This is our forever home,’ she insisted. Well, it’ll certainly take forever to fix up.
We could wait for all eternity and still never see a spark of intelligence from the dimwit candidates on The Apprentice (BBC1). The stupidity of some of them beggars belief.
The obnoxious Siobhan, a woman who could pick a fight in an empty lift, kept shrieking at anyone who crossed her that she was being ‘underminded’. How is that possible, when she barely has a mind?
Glib and smarmy Elliot, a bar- rister by training, was given the boot. He must have an education, but it didn’t enable him to spot basic grammatical errors in his team’s promotional literature for this week’s product, a dancing robot.
It wasn’t just his ignorance of apostrophes that got him fired, though. Every year, The Apprentice features one posh boy, a well-spoken chap with a degree and a lah-di-dah accent who rarely makes it past the third week.
It’s almost as if someone on the show has a bit of an inferiority complex about their own education. But that’s a heartless suggestion — and Elliot did richly deserve the sack.