House of the Year is Grand Designs without the despair
Watching Grand Designs: House of the Year (Channel 4) is a different experience to watching the regular version of the show. There are no couples mired in existential despair. Presenter Kevin Mccloud is extremely chipper, because he doesn’t have to stand on a rain-lashed building site listening to people explain that they’re facing bankruptcy and their dream home doesn’t have a roof. It’s just a jolly look around some finished houses, which the Royal Institute of British Architects has deemed sufficiently exceptional to make its House of the Year longlist.
The fun, then, is in nosying around and deciding if you could live there. It’s a matter of personal taste. The pink house on Camber Sands (yes, I Googled its location) was beautiful inside, although the architect didn’t make the area itself sound delightful: 30-40 mph winds on a typical day, getting up to 80-90mph at times. No wonder they put in triple glazing.
Leyton House in east London was fine, although if I had enough money to dig out an enormous basement then I’d probably move out of Leyton. (No offence to readers from Leyton.)
A self-build in West Stirlingshire was notable mostly because it had a giant cupboard dedicated to gin, and a
staircase painted so black that Natasha Huq, one of Mccloud’s co-presenters, asked how the owners managed to find their way up the stairs.
In rural Derbyshire, a chap called Ian had renovated a 1960s bungalow in retro style, down to the tangerine sofa and those wardrobe units that go over the bed. Ian had found a scrap of original Sixties carpet and found a factory to recreate it, at which point I wished we could revert to normal Grand Designs rules and find out just how much he’d spent.
When Ian and his wife inherited the place, “the roof was about to fail, there was no heating in half the house, very little insulation, the windows were on their last legs – apart from that, it was perfect.”
The Red House in rural Dorset may be your idea of perfection, although I couldn’t help agreeing with the neighbours whom the owners had overheard saying in a stage whisper: “It’s hard to imagine anything less appropriate for the site.” The window frames, doors and guttering were a hideous bright green, giving it the look of a GP practice built in the 1980s. Mccloud described it as being “as mind-boggling a work of postmodern art as I’ve ever seen”, which I think is Grand Designs-speak for: “Thank God I don’t live here.”
Nothing restores one’s faith in human nature like DIY SOS, the series in which Nick Knowles and his team carry out renovations for deserving folk. In The Big Build for Children in Need (BBC One) they super-sized it by creating a permanent home for Getaway Girls, a charity in Leeds which had once operated from a cramped terraced house and now needed larger premises.
The project was ambitious, the timescale was tight, and it required a huge number of volunteers. This is the most wonderful thing about DIY SOS: the sight of people offering their time and services free of charge, in a spirit of generosity and community. All marshalled by Knowles, who is exactly the kind of positive, can-do presence this show requires.
Unusually, though, I got through this episode without shedding a tear. Only the hint of a lip wobble when the girls’ choir performed a rather lovely song at the end. Mostly, this was because the project was a tie-in with Radio 2, which meant that half of the episode was given over to various DJS – Zoe Ball, DJ Spoony, Sara Cox, Trevor Nelson and Scott Mills – who did the interviewing and presenting bits that Knowles would normally do, but not half as well as he would have done them. Only Rylan lifted proceedings with a comic turn, turning up in a pink high-vis jacket with a can of hairspray in his toolbox. It was a welcome injection of fun.
As everyone tightens their belts this year, I wonder if Children in Need may struggle to match its usual fundraising total. We didn’t hear the usual tearjerking stories that feature in DIY SOS, for extremely good reasons of privacy: among its activities, the charity supports girls and young women who have suffered from relationship abuse, domestic violence and sexual abuse. The girls who did appear on screen were being helped to develop selfesteem and resilience, forging friendships and finding respite from what was going on in their lives. DJS aside, the programme did a decent job of highlighting the importance of unsung charities such as these.
Grand Designs: House of the Year ★★★★
DIY SOS: The Big Build for Children in Need ★★★