Life as I know it
Flamboyant interiors guru Laurence, 54, lives in the Cotswolds with his wife, Jackie, and their extended family
With interiors guru Laurence Llewelyn-bowen
Not a lot of people know this but I’m very good at... riding a camel. When I was doing a holiday programme for BBC1, following in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia, we had a massive problem with the camera. I had nothing to do for the afternoon and the camel handler started teaching me and at the end of the afternoon I’d gone beyond proficient. He felt I could race camels professionally. There’s something for my retirement…
My best friend is… without doubt my wife, Jackie. That’s one of the things both of us have been so lucky with. It’s our 30th wedding anniversary this year. Both of us are so unbelievably blessed that we found each other so young. We met when we were 19, introduced by a friend of Jackie’s, and it was an instant Olympian attraction.
My nickname is… I’ve never really had one. Laurence is one of those names that is so difficult to reduce. I remember being on the first shoot of the show I do in Australia and they were all introducing themselves with slang names. They said, “What do we call you?” I said, “Laurence.” But when they started promoting the show they kept calling me LLB. It’s stuck. The bravest thing I’ve ever done is… Celebrity Painting Challenge on BBC. There was a point where I had to make a decision between I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, which is meant to be a big thing in celebrity terms – it certainly comes with a hefty price tag – or do Painting Challenge for the BBC and you do it for the glory of it. I suppose it was brave to go for the one that didn’t pay. My favourite TV show is... old Open University documentaries. I have managed to get the Amazon Firestick to work when I’m filming all over the world. I discovered I can get hold of old OU documentaries. Give me half a bottle of gin and the documentaries and I am made for an evening in a hotel room in Oz.
My perfect evening is... It’s important to come together as a family. So as a family we make a positive effort to spend a pleasant evening enjoying each other’s company. Our daughters Cecile and Hermione and their partners all live with us. The joy now is we have a two-year-old grandson, Albion. We have a wonderful organic, very easy-going meal. The table gets laid nicely, wine glasses are there, napkins, candles. It doesn’t matter what you are eating, it’s spending the time together.
I’d like to say sorry to... I think I’ve spent most of my TV career dodging people trying to make me apologise for things I did on Changing Rooms. I’m afraid I never will. I do still think that everything I did – all those crazy, scary colours, Gothic detail – was all done from a good place.
My first kiss was... Can I even remember that far back? I mean we are dealing practically with another century. The one thing I’d change about myself is... I’ve always been very disappointed that through some quirk of fate I was born without a tail. I would love to have a tail. Big and foxy, a brush. I said this to Jackie once and she admitted that she once actually fancied Basil Brush. The best thing my parents taught me was... My father died when I was nine, so I have limited memories of him. My mother never stopped teaching me. She was a very strong woman.
Not hugely emotional, not sentimental or romantic, but very intellectual. She tried hard to get me to engage at being as good at whatever I did as I possibly could be. The last time I cried was… watching Monarch Of The Glen
– an episode where the Richard Briers character, Hector Macdonald, died. I just sobbed and sobbed. It was a bit of displacement really as it wasn’t long after my mother died. I’m not a great crier.
You get the odd moment on a plane when you’ve had a couple of gins and you are watching a sad film… The first record I ever bought was… Slayed? by Slade. I think there was a bit of peer pressure going on, to be honest. The first record I bought and really enjoyed and never stopped playing was the Kate Bush album, The Kick Inside.
It’s not good for my image but I like... Which is a statement I never make and never have. I always feel if it’s me, it’s me. A couple of times I’ve been paparazzied in a tracksuit
and much was made of it. If I want to wear a towelling suit, so what? I will.
My greatest weakness is... If there is something I am embarrassed by or feel guilty about, I tend to not to do it. If I could pass any law I would... I had a scary moment where I did a mockumentary about running for Parliament. I had to come up with many laws, so I devised a net curtain tax, where I was going to ban net curtains. Another was banning caravans from the front of houses.
The shop I can’t walk past is… TK Maxx or Homesense. To me it’s good old-fashioned retailing. There is a really compelling sense of “better buy it now, they won’t have it again” – a very clever retailing thing in an area that is so boring and so beige and pasteurised. The most expensive thing I’ve ever splashed
out on is… our 17th-century manor house in the Cotswolds, which is really just a fabulous family home. At one point, when the girls got older, we were going to sell it. But then they decided they wanted to come and live with us, which is just a joy. So here we are.
Who would play you in a film? Basil Brush.
My favourite place in Britain is... As the curator for the Illuminations and chairman of the Blackpool Museum Trust, I am unbelievably fond of Blackpool. We should be more appreciative. I get emotional at the switch-on of the Illuminations. The last weekend of summer, when everything should be finishing, suddenly there is a sense of something starting. All that light, that colour, that warmth. And with a bag of chips in your hand – what could be better?
My last holiday was… a sneaky couple of weeks at Dinarobin in Mauritius. This is the pattern of lives at the moment. Because I’m filming in Oz and Malaysia, it’s difficult to come all the way back to the UK. So we often end up meeting somewhere glamorous, like Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, or Singapore. Our 30-year marriage is starting to feel like a 1940s affair – all airports and glam hotels. The best day of my life was… I’m going to be really irritating and say I want it to be the day that I’m living. If I had half an hour left on Earth, I’d… I don’t see myself hitting the bottle or frantically ordering a burger. I’d try to find strength, solace, simplicity and beauty in that last half hour.
“I won’t apologise for things I did on Changing Rooms”