Cop shop’s in great nick

AS I THINK I may have said before, but which I’m going to say again just in case I haven’t, I am a huge fan of TV architect George Clarke. Indeed, I’d probably go so far as to call him my favourite TV architect of all time, if only because I can’t think of any others.

As as has been the case with all his previous series, I look upon

GEORGE CLARKE’S REMARKABLE RENOVATIONS

(C4, 9pm) as simply a wonderful hour of comfort viewing.

It’s not one of those programmes where I feel I should be taking notes, as I might if were watching someone demonstrating a tasty looking recipe on Saturday Kitchen, for example, or repainting their lounge in an appealing shade on Repainting Your Lounge In An Appealing Shade With The Stars.

No, the people we meet on George’s programmes, taking on massive building projects, are in an entirely different league from the likes of me, ambition-wise. I couldn’t even begin to tackle the sort of jobs they commit themselves to. I don’t have their resourcefulness, nor their patience, nor their vision, nor their energy, nor their drive.

In fact, now I stop to think about it, I’m a waste of space.

This week George is in the West Yorkshire village of Scissett, where a young couple who’ve got all those things I haven’t got – fashion retailer Rachel and her builder boyfriend Mike (all right, so I do have Mike’s name) – have decided that they’d like to live in the local police station.

Since there haven’t been any actual police in it since 1969, and since the building has been sitting empty for yonks, this isn’t quite as barmy as it sounds.

But it’s still QUITE barmy, because, as George himself says when he takes a look around the police station in its current form (complete with its original holding cells, their bars still intact): “Most of this place is the stuff of nightmares.”

I shan’t spoil your enjoyment by telling you what it looks like once it’s finished, but I promise you’ll be mildly sick with envy.

You see, that’s the great thing about George Clarke’s Remarkable Renovations: they always turn out to be precisely what the title tells us that they are going to be, not like BBC2’s allegedly REMARKABLE PLACES TO EAT

(8pm) which always turn out to be restaurants.

Also tonight, in the latest episode of FAKE OR FORTUNE?

(BBC1, 9pm) hosts Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould are hoping to find out whether a small religious oil painting is really by 19th-century French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, a leading figure in the Orientalist genre.

If it is, the painting could be worth as much as £100,000. Or what Fiona might call “three months’ pay”.