Call that a shed! It’s more like a giant alien spider on wheels

NEVER let it be said that the Great British Eccentric is a dying breed. They went into a brief decline, it’s true, about 20 years ago when monochrome John Major was running the country and everybody spoke in bland corporate jargon.

But look at the place now. The Mayor of London wears his hair like a peroxide dishmop and talks as though he’s escaped from the pages of The Beano.

The Leader of the Opposition, Comrade Corbyn, grows knobbly veg on his allotment and rides a bicycle around the capital’s fumeclogged streets because he thinks this will save the polar bears.

And the Prime Minister waddles around on his holidays in a rubber surfing wetsuit like a giant jellyfish, and has an alarming habit of forgetting where he left his children.

Certifiable, the lot of them. All this oddness is bound to affect the nation, and outbreaks of eccentricity are increasingly common, as we saw on Amazing Spaces (C4).

Sculptor Peter, who lives on the edge of a cliff overlooking the North Sea in Norfolk, had promised his son Luka that he’d build a shed in the garden with a retractable roof, so they could lie out there at night and look up at the stars.

That’s a charming notion. But Peter was allergic to drawing up plans on paper, which gave a highly eccentric twist to the scheme.

He set out to build a little cabin, using wood from an abandoned chapel, and ended up with a towering two-storey structure with jutting supports, like an alien spider peering out to sea.

The construction was on wheels, to circumvent planning restrictions — the council classed it as a caravan. But you’d have to be bonkers to want a wooden, B-movie monster rolling around your clifftop garden.

Amazing Spaces specialises in homemade architectual oddities like these, and if it took more time getting to know the eccentrics who create them the show would be more rewarding.

But much of the programme consists of rapid-fire editing that fl i ckers f rom one f l ashback to another, so fast that you can barely work out what each building is before it’s gone. The first four minutes of this episode were just a blurred collage of designs, which soon became unwatchable.

Presenter George Clarke doesn’t help. He’s from the Alan Whicker school of broadcasters, always walking towards the camera expostulating and waving his hands around.

Each series features a personal project that George builds with his mate Will, a bearded hipster in a hat: this time they’re converting a seaside beach hut into a boat that will motor along the coast from resort to resort. Putting to sea in a beach hut isn’t eccentric — it’s suicidal.

Interior designer Sarah Moore’s daytime show Money For Nothing (BBC1), which started last week and screens every afternoon, has been veering into outlandish realms, too. Sarah hangs around municipal rubbish dumps and cadges junk off members of the public, who are usually all too pleased to save themselves the trouble of chucking it in the skip.

Then s he ‘ upcycles’ and ‘repurposes’, fashionable words for tarting it up and selling it on.

Kirstie Allsopp has been doing this for years, taking grotty objects and turning them into dreadful heaps of tat. If that doesn’t sound very impressive, it isn’t.

But Sarah, a former winner of BBC2’s Great Interior Design Challenge, is genuinely talented and is building a thriving business from household waste. Yesterday she spruced up a glass cabinet and a box of old toys.

Perhaps her most impressive coup came on Wednesday when she took a battered sofa that a charity shop had rejected, and covered it in bits of patterned linen from a car boot sale. For 60 quid, she transformed a settee that was heading for landfill into a beautiful piece that looked well worth the £1,200 it fetched.

The title is misleading: this isn’t Money For Nothing, because Sarah does have to pay for materials and for hiring craftsmen. But there’s clearly cash to be made, and she’s encouraging us to think twice before throwing stuff out. Nothing eccentric about that.