Shed all your inhibitions to life of upcycling

KEVIN Mccloud’s Man Made Home (BBC Lifestyle) is a jolly show full of First World middle-class silliness. For context, middle class silliness is a set of contemporary beliefs including the British Labour Party, identity politics, veganism, anti-vaccination and cross-eyed hostility to GMO foods. Those are the big ones. Kevin Mccloud occupies a lesser stratum of silliness made up of fantasies of self-sufficiency and a faintly daft hostility to the manifest benefits of material progress.

He does this by pretending that a designer shack made out of industrial waste is a “Good Thing” instead of a last ditch attempt by families who live without shelter, as is widely experienced in this country.

Now, a minor though emotional signifier in the lives of the British is ownership of something called “a shed”. This means a cabin of sorts, a wendy house maybe, into which Britons retreat when the racket of bourgeois family life makes its damaging intrusions.

In the solitude of the shed, surrounded by ruined garden implements and failed ventures into tiny-scale urban vegetable production, the shed owner muses on life in the comforting fetor of tobacco fumes and fertilizer. That’s a shed. God alone knows why it’s desirable. More to the point, God alone knows why it’s fashionable. But fashionable it is, as various competitions indicate, seeking out the very best in British shed life.

Even ex-prime minister David Cameron has a shed, in which he is writing his memoirs.

Meanwhile back on the television, Kevin Mccloud is entertaining your reviewer. Kev is a mild man, prone to musing aloud, a harmless habit that allows us privileged access to his thoughts. One of them goes like this: Kev is living rough outside his shed, which has been towed to a beach in England. He wakes from a restless sleep and, without any indication at all how or where he empties his, how can I put this, bladder, he slowly chops wood, slowly ignites a small fire, slowly collects water from somewhere else, slowly brings the kettle to a smoky boil, slowly steeps a teabag and then – and only then – tells us all about the benefits of life without electricity and other refinements.

Later in the show he and a couple of other light-hearted jolly fellows make soap. Soap it seems is merely a collection of ashes and fish oil. Ashes provide something like caustic soda while fish oil provides fish oil. These are good things, found only in nature. Stripped naked, Kev and a chum stand under a gentle waterfall and wash, so to speak, with a mixture of ashes and fish oil. Somehow, they come out convinced they smell better than when they went in.

But wait, there’s more! For some reason, dressed in a wetsuit he dives into a London canal from whence he retrieves a whole lot of rusting supermarket trolleys, a Yamaha keyboard and a bike. Still perfumed by his home-made soap he takes these bits of old rubbish back to his seaside shed and “upcycles” them into lobster pots.

Lobster pots made from industrial lobster pot materials are used by successful lobster fisherfolk to trap lobsters. Keep this in mind. With the friendly connivance of a real live lobster fisherman he drops his trolley-traps into the ocean and captures two illegal lobsters. They are pregnant. They cry out for their freedom and are returned to the ocean.

Yet another great day in the world of upcycling. I have nothing more to tell you.