It’s time to check in on Agent (pronounced “Angela”) Scanlon and her mission hosting Your Home Made Perfect (BBC Two, Tuesday). After centuries of real-estate disputes, having an Irish woman hosting a UK property show could be seen as a gesture of reconciliation. As I have explained here before, however, it’s really part of a long game to destabilise the British housing market from within.
The gist of the title, and of all home-improvement shows, is that we have given up on the perfectibility of man or the creation of a utopian society and would, frankly, be content with one spacious kitchen that wasn’t filled with junk. On this week’s episode, Caitriona and Kevin have “fallen out of love with their forever home in Hertfordshire”. At no point does Scanlon chip in to say that the only real “forever home” is the grave, but you can tell that she’s thinking it. The words “forever home” are said a lot on Your Home Made Perfect; each time, Scanlon’s eyes widen with delight and her hair seems to glow a darker shade of red. Be warned: if in real life Angela Scanlon pulls up and offers to take you to your “forever home”, do not get into the car. It’s a Goodfellas situation.
Caitriona is also from Ireland, so there’s an extra frisson of danger in this episode. Occasionally she and Angela lock eyes in wordless understanding of what’s really at stake, something incomprehensible to Kevin, who thinks that a house is a mere building in which a family can live and not a bricks-and-mortar representation of a person’s whole being, cultural heritage and superiority to their neighbours and siblings.
On paper the couple’s problem is simple enough: they need more room. Thanks to their Irish roots, their children are already bickering over their future inheritance, neither wanting to sleep in the house’s tiny box room. In my day, fighting over not sleeping in the box room would be the cue for a parent to say, “You’ll both sleep in the box room,” or, “If you’re not careful I’ll send you to your forever home,” but nowadays children are legally considered business associates that adults must bargain with, so Caitriona and Kevin are spending £85,000 on an extension. In fairness, Caitriona and Kevin also want some light in their gloomy kitchen and would like somewhere to work that isn’t a freezing conservatory.
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“Well la-di-da, look at you, Mr Frenchman,” is something I say whenever a friend wants something nice, but Angela Scanlon doesn’t say this and instead encourages them in their expensive notions. The couple bicker gently. Caitriona can’t abide “wet-room showers”. Kevin is sceptical of “kitchen islands”. Theirs is a very modern debate involving phrases that would be confusing to our peasant ancestors. Throughout it all, Agent Scanlon engages in diverting tomfoolery in a variety of outfits (including, once, a sort of muumuu), emoting and jesting to the twinkly upbeat soundtrack in a manner that is somehow both high energy (involving unexpected actions) and calming (in voice). This is, I think, her superpower.
The main shtick in Your Home Made Perfect is that two architects compete to produce two different designs for the house that are shown to the owners via virtual-reality headsets of the kind we’ll all be wearing when Mark Zuckerberg condemns us to the metaverse. We at home can see the couple and the architect projected within the 3D design, much like on the long-extinct UK children’s programme Knightmare. This week an architect called Lynsey Elliott shows Caitriona and Kevin a version of their home filled with skylights, high ceilings and big windows. I’ve been predicting for years that once these islands are completely filled with big-windowed designs that constantly remind us of the troubling vastness of the universe, we’ll retreat in fear and begin to dig ourselves tight, windowless burrows in the ground, like common moles. But that day is not upon us, so Caitriona and Kevin seem impressed.
The design presented by the next architect, Damion Burrows, is similarly spacious and well lit but also features an outwardly slanted back kitchen wall, at which I personally draw the line. Rooms should be rectangular. That’s just science. All planes should be at right angles to one another or mankind gets confused about where the horizon is. I don’t want to live in Damion’s Lovecraftian nightmare of a room with strangely angled corners. No. Just no. Stop trying to make acute angles happen, Damion.
[ Angela Scanlon: ‘What I loved about lockdown was the lack of comparison’Opens in new window ]
Anyway, Caitriona and Kevin choose Damion’s mind-mangling design and Angela Scanlon is cheerily supportive of their choice, possibly aware that an influx of such unholy angles into people’s homes will slowly drive the nation mad. I hadn’t thought of that. Good woman yourself, Scanlon. Of course, it takes Caitriona and Kevin many years to complete this project, because extension building is inherently heartbreaking and the only reason people do it is to avoid going to counselling. On completion, Angela Scanlon and Damion turn up at their door once more and Angela tries to get Caitriona to do a jig in the now spacious if cursed and many-angled kitchen. Her work continues.
Awe-inspiring
On Earth (BBC Two, Monday) this week, the compellingly intense Chris Packham explores an interesting renovation project from the past, when, more than 800 million years ago, the Neoproterozoic supercontinent of Rodinia was restructured by a long ice age and the residents largely froze to death. Even Dermot Bannon would struggle with that one.
In each sweeping episode, Earth explores different periods in planetary history that involved mass extinction, using a combination of location filming and CGI re-creation. It’s awe-inspiring and quite terrifying. Packham is clearly trying to make a point about the fragility of life on this planet. Climate-change deniers will, of course, point out that after each climate emergency there were survivors who went on to do well for themselves, even though these survivors were often simple, single-celled organisms much like themselves.
Meanwhile, on Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat (Channel 4, Monday) the eponymous food gargler was cheerily exploring a cheap meat product grown from the purchased flesh of Britain’s destitute, thus solving the cost-of-living crisis on two fronts without the interference of bureaucratic regulators. It’s nice to see the shaven-headed, apple-cheeked and bespectacled Wallace (he can be drawn just using circles, like a corporate logo!) engaging with entrepreneurial problem-solving without Channel 4′s usual “woke” agenda creeping in. Indeed, if there were any bleeding hearts on this show, they were being used to create succulent vat-grown human flesh. So two thumbs up from me. (Don’t eat them, Gregg!)
