Nick Knowles is worth his weight in gold to the BBC
I’ve never given much thought to Nick Knowles, except a few years ago when the BBC first published its list of star salaries and it turned out he earned £349,000 a year. £349,000! For Nick Knowles! But after watching DIY SOS: The Big Build (BBC One), I’ve come to the conclusion that he is one of the corporation’s best presenters.
Honestly, hear me out. DIY SOS is a programme in which a team of professional builders and volunteers transform the homes of deserving people. In this case it was Caroline Blanchard and her children, Reece and Paige. Caroline had been through unimaginable tragedy. Her seven-yearold daughter, Natasha, died after hitting her head on the garage door and suffering a catastrophic bleed on the brain. Nine years later, her husband, Paul, had a heart attack at home. On both occasions, Caroline had to take the decision to turn off their life support. The house was a constant reminder of their deaths, yet Caroline didn’t want to move out of it because it was surrounded by neighbours who had provided them so much support.
It’s the sort of show that has you wiping away a tear after five minutes, then full-on blubbing by the time you reach the end. It is more difficult than it looks to get the right tone for this –
telling the story of a grief-stricken family while also showing us an upbeat building project with the crew larking about, Changing Rooms- style.
But Knowles appears to move effortlessly between the two modes, acting as part-entertainer, partcounsellor. He observed that in this country we’re not very good at death, and often struggle to know what to say to the bereaved. He didn’t pussyfoot around the subject with Caroline, asking her directly why she had brought Natasha home from hospital after her death. “She was my baby and I didn’t want to leave her,” Caroline said simply. “You don’t leave your seven-year-old anywhere.”
Knowles also sat down with Reece, a boy who had shouldered a great deal of pain and responsibility at a young age, in a conversation pitched perfectly; Knowles knowing when to kid around and when to be heartfelt.
It was bucketing down in Scunthorpe, but the team worked with smiles on their faces. Parts of the house that held painful memories were rebuilt. The transformation was fantastic. What could be a maudlin programme never fails to be uplifting because, as Knowles said, we’re seeing a community spring into action for no reward except to bring people happiness.
Only one scientist came out of Lockdown 1.0 – Following the Science? (BBC Two) well, and he wasn’t consulted on the science. Dr David Matthews is a coronavirus expert, working at the University of Bristol. As Covid-19 began spreading outside Wuhan, the Government called a meeting of advisers. “I kind of half-expected someone in Government to say, ‘Is there anybody working on dangerous human coronaviruses?’” said Matthews. Of course, they didn’t.
Why this programme now? There have been calls for a full public inquiry into the handling of the Covid crisis, and there was a sense here that the scientists were getting their defence in early. Thus we had Prof Susan Michie, of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), explain why she appeared on Newsnight defending the idea that football crowds were safe. “I was thinking of the need to keep trust in the Government,” she said lamely.
Some held their hands up. SAGE member Prof Graham Medley reflected on the fact that around 1,500 Covid cases were brought back to the UK in the early days from European ski resorts. “I should have thought, ‘Hmm, if Northern Italy has got an epidemic, it’s quite likely other places in Europe have as well.’ And I didn’t,” he said.
To underline the fact that statistics represent human lives, we were shown some of the lives lost. They included, heartbreakingly, Mary Boateng, a nurse at Luton Hospital who died days after giving birth to her daughter.
The film posed the question: “Did the scientists fail or could they become scapegoats?” The conclusion was: probably both. Catastrophically, advice on protecting care home residents was made by scientists with no idea of how care homes functioned – that many relied on agency staff who moved from one to another. Dr Ian Hall, principal modeller for Public Health England, said he now “realised care homes were not shielded in the way we thought they were”. An interviewer asked what had made him think they were being shielded. There followed a lengthy pause. “That’s a good question,” he said finally. “We never checked.”
DIY SOS: The Big Build ★★★★ Lockdown 1.0: Following the Science? ★★★