Under Irish law, if Dermot Bannon demands entry to your house, you have to let him. He has special constitutional powers, like the president or Bosco. It’s there in black and white: “The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible and sovereign right to choose its own form of government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions. Also, Dermot Bannon can come into your house whenever he wants.”
It’s something celebrity podcaster, DJ and detergent advertiser Vogue Williams discovers at the outset of Dermot Bannon’s new programme on RTÉ One, Dermot Bannon’s Celebrity Super Spacers (editor: it’s actually Dermot Bannon’s Celebrity Super Spaces) when Dermot Bannon arrives at her Howth mansion.
“We often feel we know everything about the celebrities we follow,” he says at the start of the show. “But there’s one place they mostly keep private. That is their homes.” Then he pulls a balaclava over his head and throws a rope over his shoulder. “That ends today.”
Okay, he doesn’t say or do that last bit, even though I, as Dermot Bannon’s unofficial scribe and official soulmate, think he should be allowed to do whatever he likes. The man is a living saint.
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Instead he tantalises viewers with hints about the identities of his upcoming Celebrity Spacers and I shout guesses from the comfort of my couch.
“What well-known person has a gold kitchen?” he says as we see a gold kitchen.
“Twink!” I shout. “No ... Michael Healy-Rae! No ... Bibi Baskin! No ... one of the Morbegs!”
“Which Irish singer-songwriter calls this church their home?” he says as we see a fancy churchy living space. This one’s easy.
“God!” I shout.
Unlike on his other show, Room to Improve, on which Dermot reimagines the squalid, gloomy homes of the plain people of Ireland as sun-blasted prisms and fiery glass panopticons, on Dermot Bannon’s Celebrity Spacers he’s not able to just rip down and eradicate things that offend his sensitive eyes.
These are finished homes, finished to the taste of the various spacers. Therefore, on this programme, he is practising a form of radical acceptance and has chosen to be delighted with everything.
Even when Vogue’s husband, Spencer Matthews, enters the open-plan livingroom of their Howth home wearing nothing but tiny shorts, Dermot seems happy out. Spencer Matthews is from the makey-up fantasy land Chelsea, from the fantasy drama Made in Chelsea, so he’s used to doing whatever he likes.
Later Dermot climbs into Vogue and Spencer’s bath. There isn’t a bath in the country Dermot doesn’t want to climb into. Spencer Matthews suggests he wants to bathe him. The country waits with bated breath, surprised to find that this is what they wanted all along. Sadly, Spencer Matthews resists the urge to bathe the visiting architect.
Before long Dermot Bannon is gone and Vogue and Spencer must learn to live life without him. He moves on to the home of fancy designer Geri O’Toole, who lives in some cowsheds. (I’m not going to elaborate.)
Then he hits the road again and goes to the redbrick Georgian home of Chupi Sweetman, a talented jewellery designer who has covered her house in gold, like a boho oligarch, and lives above the flat in which her mother, Rosita Sweetman, the writer and founder of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, now lives. (Chupi is literally on the shoulders of an activist giant.) It is very nice.
Dermot spends least time in the pleasant home of massive mulleted rugby player Andrew Porter, who is carrying a baby (presumably his own and not a flatmate), but this is probably because the baby keeps giving Dermot the side-eye. Not to be talking out of school, but Dermot is very competitive with babies.
Then it’s off to a deconsecrated church in Cavan, wherein lives pop songwriter Don Mescall. He has filled it with gewgaws and gimcracks, including loads of home-made lamps, loads of guitars and three motorbikes.
This look is basically Old Man Steptoe via Interiors Magazine if Old Man Steptoe wore sunglasses indoors and knew his way around a pop hook. Bannon raises an eyebrow from time to time, but, as in his previous visitations, he generally chooses the path of least resistance: delight.
The explicit theme of the show is that the celebrity homes reflect the personality, aesthetics and lifestyles of their owners (as opposed to just their general level of wealth) and that Dermot Bannon will explore this with them. (Psychoarchitecture is what we have instead of psychoanalysis in Ireland.)
The implicit theme is that Dermot is casing the joint for eventual redistribution, and all I can say to that is “Good work, Comrade Bannon!” The People’s Central Housing Committee applauds your efforts.
All of these presumably lived-in homes have an unusually low number of stains (particularly the one in which Spencer Matthews seems to habitually cavort about the place in tiny pants). My home has stains. So as I watch this show I look sadly about my own shadowy, book-cluttered sittingroom (like Spencer Matthews, I am also wearing tiny shorts) and imagine what Dermot Bannon would make of it all.
I get a sudden flash of him curled up in the foetal position in the corner, over by the stack of my wife’s tarot-card decks, shivering and muttering, “So cold. I’m so cold.” But I shake this negativity out of my head. No, he will definitely love it. And he will visit eventually. When the time comes, Dermot Bannon will visit us all.
Nancy Harris’s The Dry is back on RTÉ One, with whole new family traumas and secrets to mine for its strain of dark, well-observed comedy. Addiction, guilt, narcissism, divorce, passive aggression, trauma, new motherhood, heartbreak, jealousy, career disappointment: all the fun stuff that makes the average Irish person rub their hands with voyeuristic glee. “Ha ha! Yes!” we cry, because these stressful, chaotic lives are not our stressful, chaotic lives.
It is, as ever, excellent. “This explains everything,” Shiv (who’s played by Róisín Gallagher) says at one point, thinking she has finally uncovered the root of her family’s dysfunction, and we laugh to ourselves because we’ve all learned that there is no root to any of our hang-ups. It’s just layers of dysfunction until you reach the original single-celled amoeba, four billion years ago, as it sparked into life. (“Ah, feck. Now what?” it said).
The Dry is funny and moving and very human. Dermot Bannon will probably turn up in the final episode to architecture them all into functionality.
