Nothing personal, but how can that be a home?
Home Of The Year
RTÉ One, Tuesday
Bel-Air
Streaming on Peacock
Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America
BBC2, Sunday
It’s the age-old question raised by Home Of The Year: what is a house, and what is a home? The first episode of the annual snoopfest around other people’s gaffs aired on RTÉ One on Tuesday and once again there was tension between the two interpretations. Up for judgement were a newbuild in Killarney, a bijou terraced dwelling in Dublin, and an extended cottage in Longford. The family that owned the Kerry house had lived in Los Angeles for 20 years and the house might as well have followed them by being beamed down from Starship Enterprise Removals Inc.
It was massive for three people, and completely open plan, and included an eight-seat home cinema, a gym in the garage, and massive slabs of natural stone dotted throughout.
Aesthetically, it would be hard to argue it was not architecturally impressive, but it also was stateless. You would see houses like this in Sydney, or Cape Town, or Connecticut, but you would not see any of those places in the house. There was nothing in it to suggest an Irish vernacular, and also nothing that appeared to be even remotely personal.
A set of double doors led into the master bedroom (well, five-a-side pitch would be more accurate), and there were two more sets leading off it – one to a bathroom, the other to a dressing room. Waking up with a hangover and trying to get to the kitchen for coffee must be exhausting, while a game of hide and seek for children clearly would lead to calling the emergency services.
Of course, architect and judge Amanda Bone, who takes offence at anything that isn’t entirely functional, loved it, but then she loves anything that looks like it was cleared of anything personal before the photographer from Architects’ Journal called round.
This was underlined when she arrived to the Dublin house. It indeed was compact, but it was full of quirky ornaments and fabrics, and a riot of colour and fun, and she
dismissed it out of hand. It wouldn’t be to my taste entirely, but I would evaluate it on its merits as a home suitable for the actress owner, because drama clearly infuses her entire personality as well as her professional life.
But, no, Amanda’s vision is on the Port Tunnel scale, and if a house doesn’t chime with her personal preference – she would
think a Swiss Botox clinic was homely – then it must be dismissed.
The cottage was nice but I at least agreed the living room was disappointingly laid out (the Irish curse of always having the television in a corner to dictate where everything else goes) but the rest of it still was more of a home than a house. Mind you, a holiday house people didn’t even live in won the series a few years back, so the brief clearly is muddled anyway.
I saw a suggestion this week that a citizen judge, as it were, should join the panel, someone who is not an architect or an interior designer, and it’s a good one. We all know, when we walk into friends’ houses, that a bit of clutter makes a home, not a deep clean with Domestos and the expulsion of anything personal to the shed. Home Of The Year is as entertaining as ever but becoming increasingly unrealistic at the same time.
From home to homies, as The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air got a dramatic makeover – literally – in Bel-Air. The sitcom was iconic for the early 1990s generation, from the theme tune to the Carlton dance, but now has been reimagined as a darker drama.
It roughly follows the early life of Will Smith (the name of the lead character, played with sass by Jabari Banks) as he moves from the dangerous streets of Philadelphia to live with an aunt and uncle in the poshest part of Los Angeles (and, yes, the house is bigger than the one in Killarney).
Streaming on Peacock, a newish addition to Sky as part of the global Comcast family of television companies, it obviously sets a very different tone to the broad comedy of its predecessor and it actually works.
U ncle Phil is sterner, and Carlton, far from dancing, has a massive rod up his back, being both priggish and confrontational. Culture nowadays feeds on scraps, but at least it is nice to see them go into a new recipe. Turning a sitcom into a drama, albeit one leavened with light naturalistic humour, is both bold and entertaining.
Not so funny was Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America. Years ago, Louis had to peel back a lot of skin to get to the dark underbelly of racism and white supremacy; nowadays, it practically sends a limo to the airport to pick him up, and rolls out a red carpet when he arrives.
The focal point of the opening was a chilling little creep called Nick Fuentes, a 23-year-old of Hispanic and Italian descent, who nonetheless wants to make America white again, which always was the true meaning of MAGA anyway.
‘White men founded this country,’ he told a cheering audience. ‘It wouldn’t exist without white men, and white men are done being bullied. Genocide is being perpetrated against the white man.’
Leaving aside the inconvenient fact the United States was built on the near genocide of its original inhabitants, it is quite clear Fuentes has significant appeal to the disenfranchised.
It would be nice to think otherwise, but it was hard to shake the impression we had seen another Trump in the making.