DIY SOS and how to rebuild a broken TV brand
Once upon a time, there was DIY SOS, the runt of the litter of house renovation programmes. Then, in 2010 as austerity bit, charity entered the equation and Nick Knowles and his assembled experts turned their talents towards deserving people. DIY SOS: The Big
Build (BBC One) was born, and the brand reborn with it.
It’s still a formula, but a potent one, especially when the cause was so manifestly good as that of 20-year-old Chloe Print-Lambert, from Bidford-onAvon in Warwickshire, and her family. For two years, Chloe had been bedbound with mastocytosis, a blood condition that triggered random allergic reactions. The regular seizures and dislocation of joints necessitated confinement to a corner of the ground-floor living room, constant access to oxygen and feeding through a tube. The admirable fortitude of the Print-Lamberts was beginning to crumble. Her mother, Susie, had suffered a breakdown. Chloe had asked Susie to put her in a care home. The description of “a family in crisis” did not feel overblown.
Which, of course, was where Knowles and co came in, with nine days to redesign the house entirely. This urgency was underlined when Chloe had a cardiac arrest the weekend before the build began.
Everyone knew what they were there to do and no one overstepped their brief. The artisans (Billy, Chris, Mark – this was Christian names only territory) brought the labour, the workplace quips and the bulk of the tea consumption. “Duke of decoration” Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen turned up in a limo, proclaimed an imminent “cushion apocalypse” and got to work redesigning a child’s bedroom as an “urban chic chillout zone”. Knowles dispensed jokey asides and concluded with a Jerry Springer-style thought for the day: “Maybe you know somebody who needs your help.”
It could – perhaps should – have been tiresome and patronising. Instead, as local tradespeople volunteered their talents and tools and lesser-skilled neighbours pitched in, we saw the chimerical Big Society in action. The house was radically repurposed, while Chloe had a new, self-contained apartment to herself in the garden. Tears flowed.
This was relentlessly manipulative and pushed buttons shamelessly, while the sense of jeopardy was surely exaggerated: this project would never be allowed to fail. And yet, not even this professional churl could begrudge Chloe and family their joy, Knowles and his team their sense of satisfaction or the production team’s effective accomplishment of their mission.
The penultimate instalment of The Royal House of Windsor (Channel 4) bore the subtitle of
Fire, Feud and Fury, promising to use unprecedented access to royal letters, memos, diaries and archives to “rip aside the mask of royal pomp to reveal the human frailties and secrets”. All told, it was an unnecessarily sensational build-up for what has been a relatively level-headed documentary series. And anyway, were there any human frailties or secrets left to reveal where the ballad of Charles and Diana was concerned?
Not really, but while the facts – hurried courtship, lavish wedding, gradual estrangement, Squidgygate, Bashir, Dodi and death – were familiar enough, such a bizarre and ultimately tragic story can bear almost any number of versions. The calibre of assembled experts (Penny Junor), mischief-makers (Will Self ) and insiders (Diana’s protection officer Ken Wharfe) also helped, while the absence of Paul Burrell made me warm to it even further.
In this version, Charles was a resentful, put-upon, self-absorbed ditherer, Diana a manipulative and ferociously ambitious clothes horse with an “encyclopedic” ignorance. Yet he was also a long-suffering trouper doing his best in impossible circumstances, while she was an uncannily empathetic force for good.
It is to the production’s credit that all these interpretations seemed plausible, while the residual charge of Diana’s “Queen of Hearts” interview, or the Queen’s unprecedented, conciliatory public address to a howling nation after Diana’s death, remained considerable.
Unfortunately, parallels between the treatment and perspectives of Diana and Edward VIII felt laboured: warmed over from earlier episodes to give some heft to proceedings. The really revelatory claim was that Prince Philip, of all people, was the only one to emerge with much credit.