DIY SOS: a teary reminder of man’s capacity to be kind
Long-running and fathomlessly big-hearted DIY SOS: the Big Build (BBC One) has as simple a premise as any massappeal TV show could have: find a deserving cause, or a family in trouble, and make lives better by getting local builders to help them by doing some much-needed construction service for free.
It’s a series that, generally, works very hard to make you feel other people’s pain. But the setbacks – or “hard knocks” – experienced by last night’s recipient, 46-year-old roofer Darren from Hull, were of a scale to make you gulp. He was a strapping chap who’d lost his livelihood to a nerve disorder that now confined him to a wheelchair – that alone would have been enough to make most people reach out and help. But Darren is also a father to three teenage sons, one of whom, Olly, has been disabled since birth and requires round-theclock monitoring and care. And, by way of another hammer-blow, the boys’s mother and Darren’s wife, Sarah, died suddenly a couple of Christmases ago, leaving the family utterly bereft and struggling to get from one end of each day to the other.
The response to presenter Nick Knowles’s plea for help from the
builders and building services sector of Hull was as generous as it was magnificent. Within 10 days 100 or so skilled volunteers had transformed Darren’s cramped home with an extension that enabled him to sleep in his own bed for the first time in two years (he’d been camping in with Olly, unable to get up the stairs) and installed a lift that gave him access to the whole of his home, a new disability-friendly kitchen and bathrooms, and a slew of other struggle-easing additions.
People weep so copiously on TV nowadays that its affect has been diluted. But Darren’s tearfully heartfelt response (especially given that he himself had helped on a previous
DIY SOS project) was soul-stirring – straight from the heart and not so much for the home improvements, one felt, as for the huge display of sympathy and human fellowship that he’s been gifted. DIY SOS may be an old formula, and in purely televisual terms not much happens between the opening dilemma and the closing big reveal other than building work and banter. But it’s a reminder that people really do have an enormous capacity to be kind to each other. And in these confusing political times that’s as life-affirming as everyday television gets.
For any crime drama to work you have to get viewers to buy into the fundamentals of setting, plot and character – preferably all three. And while the setting of
The Bay (ITV) in Morecambe is credible enough, three episodes in I’m still not convinced by the story or the lead characters.
That a major inquiry into the disappearance of two vulnerable teenagers – let alone one that has since evolved into a “Category A” murder case – would be led by a local inspector with a tiny team and no supervision really doesn’t ring true. Nor does the complete absence of interest from local or national press, when such a story would surely have the media in thrall for weeks, exerting enormous pressure. As for the curious lack of investigative urgency, and a police team that asks the most basic questions only when a plot-point requires them to do so? They end up looking, unintentionally, incompetent.
My biggest bugbear is the lead character DS Lisa Armstrong who, despite having the brilliant Morven Christie playing her, doesn’t fully stack up as a character. Would any police officer (and mother of two children the same age as the missing/murdered pair) really suppress vital evidence (of her being with one of the prime suspects at a key moment) and withhold information that put another suspect’s safety at risk
(her accidental leaking of his details to a potentially vengeful parent) with so little cost to her conscience? As for last night’s scene in which she suggested the parents apply for compensation payments, when they still had one child missing and unaccounted for – I mean, really?
In other words, there’s barely enough appeal in The Bay to keep me watching. The acting is of a generally high standard; which makes up for some of the script’s failings. And there remains the intriguing question of what happened to those young people. With three episodes still to go, the pace needs to quicken and the pieces need to start falling persuasively into place if there’s to be any hope of seeing this one through to the end.
DIY SOS: the Big Build ★★★★ The Bay ★★