The very cool home on ice where you can go fishing from your sofa
Catherine King and Wayne adams might be the most romantic couple in the world. it’s hard to believe they’re real — they seem to have escaped from the pages of a Booker Prize novel.
She’s a dancer, who grows all their food by singing to it: ‘Dear juicy tomatoes, i’m so full of gratitude to you.’ he’s a handyman, who built their floating home on a pink-and-blue raft off the Canadian shore, with its own lighthouse and open-air dancefloor.
When the cove freezes, Wayne saws a hole through the ice in the living-room floor and sits on his sofa, fishing. every night, Catherine dances for him.
this wonderful pair of old hippie lovers were stars on World’s Weirdest Homes (C4), as Charlie Luxton explored what can happen in those lucky parts of the planet without a district council planning committee.
But far more interesting than the architecture were the characters who choose to live in these crazy houses. Christian entrepreneur aad Peters was sailing a replica of noah’s ark along holland’s canals, hoping to spread the Word.
Unfortunately, aad’s experiment had uncovered a plothole in the Bible story: you can’t persuade elephants to live on boats. Camels and tigers don’t enjoy it, either. Snakes seem quite happy with
GANGSTERS OF THE WEEK: The Secret Life Of The Zoo (C4) informed us that a pack of meerkats is known as a ‘mob’. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. We already know they sell insurance — it’s inevitable they’ll expand into liquor and gambling.
maritime life, he said hopefully, apparently forgetting that the serpent tends to be a bit of an Old testament troublemaker.
teenage Youtube star rashed, who goes by the moniker MoneyKicks, was having more luck with his menagerie in Dubai. not only did he have white tigers, a pride of lions and some zebras (a snack for the lions, probably), but the likes of Mariah Carey would drop in to his private zoo to cuddle the baby chimps.
rashed, you’ll be dumbfounded to hear, wasn’t just any amateur animal-lover. his dad was a multibillionaire. Sixteen-year-old rashed’s other hobby was decorating his collection of Lamborghini and Ferrari supercars in plastic wrappers designed by Versace. and they say money can’t buy class.
Beside these characters, amiable Marcio, who escaped from rio de Janeiro’s infamous slums to live in a giant sandcastle on the beach, seemed quite normal.
the real nuts were the scientists at the Mars research Facility in Utah’s red dirt desert, who lived in a tent like half a golf ball and refused to venture outside without spacesuits and helmets. this worthy project is partly funded by tesla founder elon Musk. Surely, that puts an end to those baseless allegations that he’s a wacko fruitloop.
high on the wacko fruitloop scale is Billy Winters, the whiskyaddled quarry boss whose buttoned-up facade can’t hide his terrible compulsion to sack everyone he sees, in Death And Nightingales (BBC2).
When actor Pip torrens turned up as a blackmailing english spy, Billy (played by Matthew rhys) threw him out on his backside with such force that barrels of dynamite went off and covered the cast in dust. it was a rare moment of action in this suffocatingly slow drama.
at one point, it took Billy (wearing a furry anaconda for his moustache) one minute and 15 seconds to ride up the driveway. he then spent another two minutes soliloquising to his horse.
everyone talks to themselves in Death and nightingales, probably because it would be unrealistic to expect others to listen to such prosy claptrap.
at first, i thought that gormless expression Jamie Dornan wears, as brooding farmer Liam, was meant to convey deep emotion, but now i suspect he’s just bored out of his brain. at least that hideous fiddle music has been toned down.