How to keep the neighbours sweet: stay out of their shed!
Back in the glory days of DIY, every homeowner had to be able to wallpaper a room and build their own furniture. My parents spent months in the Seventies sawing, sanding and varnishing a coffee table so indestructible, it would survive a nuclear holocaust.
kevin Mccloud wants to harness that spirit and put it to work solving the Uk’s housing crisis, on Grand Designs: The Street (c4).
Like everything else he suggests on this absorbingly crackpot show, it looked a great idea on paper. knee-deep in mud on-site on a wet Monday, it was a different story.
The plan was to buy plots of disused MoD land outside Oxford and build a row of innovative homes, each tailored to the buyer’s particular needs. and no construction firms would be involved: this was strictly DIY.
Terry, 65, threw himself into the labour, despite diabetes and carpal tunnel syndrome, an agonising nerve condition. His 74-year- old wife Olwen tried to help, but walked into a scaffolding pole.
Next door, their close friend Lynn, 63, was gamely attempting to match them, even though each breeze-block was bigger than her own body. I can’t even put up a tent, so I’m filled with admiration for their ambition. ‘ Let’s do this
while we still physically can,’ declared Terry, wrestling with a crane that squirted liquid concrete like a 100ft icing nozzle.
But the grim fascination of this show was seeing how horribly, shockingly wrong it all could go.
Before Lynn’s walls were halffinished, the first frosts had shattered her concrete floors and wrecked the heating pipes.
When she finally got the roof on, it split apart at the apex. Fixing that meant demolishing a wall, at an extra cost of £20,000.
and as she wrestled with scaffolding, this diminutive former teacher exploded, ‘I never want to see another f****** plank in my life. Not a good idea, wish I’d never done it. Bad move.’
Worst of all, the stress broke Lynn’s friendship with Terry and Olwen. She kept borrowing their tools, and when she started using their shed for storage without permission, a neighbourly line was crossed. It seems suburban moral codes begin with the foundations of the house.
Both builds went about a hundred grand over budget. kevin predicts the street will expand to become a town of 2,000 selfbuilt houses. If you fancy joining in, make sure you take your own tools... and a shed.
While emotions were at breaking point outside Oxford, all was level calm at the police station in cardiff, on Code Blue: Murder ( ITV). This documentary, tracking an investigation from the first 999 call to the killer’s sentencing, dispelled the myth of dramas such as The Bay, that all coppers are perpetually on the brink of tearful breakdowns.
This undramatic approach emphasised what a tawdry, unglamorous business real-life murders are. a young mother was beaten and stabbed to death by her psychotically jealous new boyfriend. He then went on the run, taunting her family and his own ex-girlfriends with text messages about what he’d done.
The one moment of real excitement came from ccTV footage at the railway station in Weston- super-Mare, Somerset, when the killer was bundled to the ground and arrested by undercover officers.
Watching his slow- witted, callous attempts at evasion in the interview room was simply depressing. He claimed he had his victim’s blood on his clothes because he head-butted her during an argument. an unknown intruder must have committed the murder, he said.
It was all bitterly sad and ugly.