Can Changing Rooms fix Generation Woke?
Can you believe there’s a whole generation of people who have never ragrolled their sitting room? Transformed their bedroom into a Louis Quatorze cheese dream of faux ormolu, ostrich feathers and papier mache Corinthian pillars?
How gratifying then, to learn that Changing Rooms could be returning to our screams. Sorry, I mean screens.
Imagine it; professional dandy Laurence Llewelynbowen and his trusty staple gun poised to reunite with lovely Carol Smillie, who left the world of defiantly cheapskate DIY to launch a line of incontinence knickers and is now a Humanist celebrant (google if you don’t believe me).
Back in the day, kids (1996 to 2004) Changing Rooms was the very definition of can’t-watch, must-watch, OMG please-saythey-didn’t-really-do-that television.
Every week a team of wilfully outré designers – and, of course, Cockney chippie “Handy Andy” – would pitch up on various doorsteps and let their deranged ideas run free in a tasselled, curlicued orgy of egregious bad taste. I sneer, but I’d be fibbing if I said I never once stencilled. Why, when I
bought my first flat, a friend and I spent four days delicately micro-sponging my boudoir in four shades of yellow.
The programme itself was predicated on the idea of neighbours redecorating rooms for each other in a spirit of amiable goodwill.
The reality left many a couple shouting, weepy and, when a botched floating shelf unit fell down in the night, aghast at the shattered loss of their entire antique teapot collection.
In short; excellent prime time entertainment. My favourite episode was the one where the appalled householder declared his animal print bedroom looked “like a whore’s palace” and, judging from the tone of his voice, not in a good way.
The essence of the show was a quick fix, preferably with a badly-executed trompe l’oeil, a flounce or two of purple viscose and a shabby-chic lick of blue on the mahogany dresser.
I’d love it if Changing Rooms made a comeback, but are woke millennials tough enough to take it? Truly, watching paint dry has never been so freighted with jeopardy.