“[Wife’s name]! [Wife’s name]!” I cry. “Our couch is on Home of the Year!” “And does it look better in a house that’s not full of shite?” my wife shouts back (our neighbours love us). But she does come in to see it. She understands the importance of this moment.
The fact that we have a couch worthy of being on Home of the Year, if only for a couple of seconds, means that we might not actually be the unreconstructed, suburban chaos pigs we fear we are, but might be sophisticated grown-ups like Wham! and their friends in the Last Christmas video or Margo and Jerry in The Good Life. I have a tear in my eye.
We rewind and look at it again. It’s definitely the same couch. “It’s not covered in shite,” says my wife with quiet wonder. “There isn’t a cat scratching it,” she says. “Nobody is sitting on it wrong,” she says, peering at me judgementally. I barely notice. I just take a picture of the couch to show my boss when I’m asking for a raise.
In Ireland’s national religion (judging other people’s houses), Home of the Year is to Room to Improve what Easter Sunday is to the fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. It doesn’t feature the lumpen Eliza Doolittles that Dermot Bannon seeks to educate like Henry Higgins, but focuses instead on earthbound home improvement gods who appear suffused in a halo of notions, before ascending to heaven or joining a golf club. We hate them all, of course. Each of them will be known as “Home of the Year” down the pub for the rest of their lives. “Here’s Home of the Year,” we’ll say, lest they think they’re better than us.
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In general, the contemporary Irish are a simple people, content to be shown pictures of nice houses. We pass the property section of this newspaper among ourselves like samizdat while looking at our disappointing families ruefully. There’s a danger, of course, that seeing the homes on Home of the Year will give young people unrealistic expectations of either homes or, indeed, sex, when it’s time for them to leave the family home in their forties. But in a way, too, it’s educational, particularly about how good my couch is.
There are three homes in the first episode of the new series (Tuesday, RTÉ1). Presumably these are the three houses that were promised in the Government’s Housing for All document (since downsized to Housing for Three and now whittled down to Homes of the Year). One property is a nicely extended 1950s house that has my couch in it; one is an extended cottage with its own pub, built by a returning emigrant (“I suspect this is somebody who is returning to Ireland, their dream is to live in a thatch cottage,” says Hugh Wallace, who is clearly a witch); and one is a literal barn. (“It actually feels like you could open this door and bring the horses in,” says Amanda Bone in amazement). Each one of these homes is better than your stupid house, especially the one with my couch in it.
These properties are judged by a holy trinity of ethereal beings that include Wallace, a vision in statement spectacles and a floral-patterned shirt. He sort of saunters up the lane as though he’s walked all the way from Dublin. And sure, why not? I’d saunter too if I was Hugh Wallace.
Sara Cosgrove is another of the judges. She says things like “There’s angles, there’s curves, there’s different materiality,” as though describing an eldritch entity from a HP Lovecraft story, though it’s probable that she is just describing an extension. At one point, she also says the words “a sense of wow”, like a stone-cold psychopath.
Wallace’s sort-of nemesis is Bone, who glides on-screen elegantly. Theirs is an ancient enmity, a bitter architectural schism. For while Bone’s ideal home is entirely white, like the rooms at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey or a nice sanatorium, Wallace likes homes that are colourful and cluttered, like a drawing by a child with too much confidence. Look, I know I’m probably exaggerating their differences. I barely understand half of the things they say on the show. I nod along in agreement anyway, in case the neighbours are gawping in the window (trying to get a glimpse of my couch).
In this episode, Wallace and Bone clash over whether the first couple were correct to wallpaper their pantry. Bone would have preferred a bare rendition site of a room, flooded with white light and cleanable with a power-hose; Wallace favours being buried alive screaming in a landslide of floral patterns. Again, this probably doesn’t reflect the nuance in their positions. For the most part, their differences are expressed in the form of wry asides and giving each other the side eye but I suspect that when the cameras stop rolling these measured aesthetes set to rowdy brawling, much like the characters in Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue (I write Home of the Year fan fiction).
Do I like it? Well, our favourite things in Ireland are: half empty industrial estates, having foreigners tell us we’re great, blaming our mothers, seeing our couch on television and looking inside other people’s houses. Yes, of course I like it. What am I? Dutch?
Another thing we Irish people love is exporting our best talent across the water. Several talented Irish people pop up in the course of Disney’s eight-part comedy series Extraordinary. Emma Moran (Irish) created this show about a power-free young woman played by Máiréad Tyers (Irish) in a version of London where everyone gets superpowers on their 18th birthday. That includes her mother, played by Siobhán McSweeney (Irish) and her deceased dad, voiced by Ardal O’Hanlon (Irish), through the dead-summoning powers of her best friend, played by Sofia Oxenham (not Irish). They’re all brilliant.
Even if you dislike recreational Irish-person-spotting, Extraordinary is a very funny and cleverly realised show. It combines the wacky world-building and sight gags of animated comedies like Bojack Horseman or Harley Quinn, with the chaotic warmth of house-share shows like Men Behaving Badly, Bachelors Walk or Being Human.
If you want a more family friendly programme about supernatural house-sharing, then Joe Cornish’s adaptation of Lockwood & Co. (Netflix) about three oddball, ghostbusting teens in a grimy, perpetually 1980s alternative Britain is also very good. The recent proliferation of culture-eating franchises has led to a sort of synthetic sameness in a lot of contemporary sci fi and fantasy. The creators of Extraordinary and Lockwood & Co. escape this trap to create shows that feel distinctive and lived in. A bit like, I suppose, a Home of the Year.
