No hitch to going kitsch
IT’S week three of INTERIOR DESIGN MASTERS WITH ALAN CARR (BBC Two, 8pm), the show where “10 aspiring designers are putting their lives on hold in search of a dream”.And the good news is that two of them don’t have to any more, having been eliminated. They must be so relieved.What a faff that must have been.
For the eight still in contention, tonight means a particularly challenging wedding brief – not a distressingly constrictive undergarment but the latest mission set for them by judge Michelle Ogundehin.
Before they hear what it involves, they’re keen to tell us how pumped up they are.
“I’m sure the bar is going to be raised – and I’m going to raise MY bar even higher!” declares the one with the beard and the glasses, introducing a high-jump metaphor that perhaps needs a little work.
“I think people have raised their game?” adds the one with the hair who makes everything she says sound like a question. “It’s just a case of maintaining it, no matter what the brief?”
Michelle, when she swans in, makes it clear that this week’s task, designing hotel bedrooms, will be a toughie. “This is no ordinary hotel,” she warns. “This is a destination wedding venue.” (I’m guessing a non-destination wedding venue is one where your car breaks down en route and you have to trudge to the nearest Travelodge instead.)
To tart this place up, the designers are split into two teams. One must work to a brief of “understated glamour and subtle luxury,” the other must make the hotel rooms look like “an absolute dogs’s dinner”, although the expression Michelle actually uses is “maximal”.
Elsewhere, over on ITV, we have the last in the series of Joanna Lumley Pootles Around Britain For No Obvious Reason But It’s Perfectly Pleasant To Watch And It No Doubt Pays The Bills – or, as ITV prefers to call it, JOANNA LUMLEY’S HOME SWEET HOME –TRAVELS IN MY OWN LAND (8pm).
In this final episode Joanna visits a Somerset cider farm and meets the man from the GoCompare ad, although obviously not at once as that would be weird.The cider she samples, she tells her host, she’d be “quite happy to drink instead of champagne any day”, but I don’t believe her.
Also tonight, expect surprises aplenty as we start series 14 of BEN FOGLE: NEW LIVES IN THE WILD (C5, 9pm), the main one being that series 13 only finished last Tuesday.
It’s actually a catch-up thing, where Ben revisits hermits he’s hung out with in previous episodes. Tonight he’s taking a trip to the Yorkshire Dales to catch up with Clive and Amanda Owen, five years after he first met them and their eight children.