Long-time fans of this column (Anyone? Come on there must be one of you) will know that I have a peculiar aversion to wholesome TV. This is, simply, because I am quite a nasty person. You can’t say that these days, can you? We all have to try to maintain the artifice that we’re all good and moral and true. Well, I’m not. I’m horrible. So fuzzy-sided, warm-hearted television that has absolutely no scenes where someone’s head explodes very rarely does it for me.
It’s with trepidation, then, that we head to Tobermory on the Isle of Mull (a simple tube, megabus, bus, bus, ferry journey that takes 18 hours door-to-door) for Designing the Hebrides, a new fuzzy-sided, warm-hearted interior design TV show where absolutely nobody’s head ever explodes. The rough sketch is this: Banjo Beale, who won series three of the cosily enjoyable Interior Design Masters, lives on the Isle of Mull. A lot of places on the Isle of Mull are not what you’d call interior design. So he’s going to make them interior design, with a ragtag team of very Scottish joiners and a lot of enthusiasm. That’s about it. That’s the whole show.
But can I just shock you? I like Designing the Hebrides (Wednesday 12 April, 8pm, BBC Two), and I like it because it’s so low-jeopardy. It is often, very simply, a quite enthusiastic Australian man in a crumpled jacket holding his hand to his forehead and thinking about how he can make a piece of wood go a bit further. There are, for reasons that cannot be explained, often just scenes of him having a non-sequitur conversation with his husband, who is always muddling with a large block of cheese. Very often it seems that the people he’s interior designing for are his close personal friends, and that helps strip some of the too-planned-out, too-inventoried gloss under which shows such as this often suffer.
Occasionally, there is a completely mind-blowing sentence such as: “The island has a community of just 10.” In the middle of every project, everyone around Banjo is very gently tired of his faffy decision-making and the fact that his practical skills are next to zero. But nothing ever goes too wrong and nobody is ever trying too hard to be entertaining or heart-rending. It’s just warm, slow, low-frequency TV to relax to. It’s sort of like dunking your brain, like a biscuit, into a really big cup of tea.
This column does hold space for criticism, though, and with DtH my feedback is this: there’s too much narrator. The show starts with a hyperbolic high-tempo montage featuring a bright “Meet Banjo!” that suggests that Banjo is about to be one of the most eccentric, always-on, never-shut-up interior designers you’ve ever seen on TV. He’s not: he’s actually quite gentle and mild and flustered, with a great line in amusing self-denigration, and bustles about on his little jobs as if the cameras aren’t really there.
This is great to watch, but not much by way of storytelling – Banjo rarely if ever turns to the camera and explains, for instance: “Oh, we didn’t order enough timber so we are going to have to rethink the exterior of this fish shop,” or anything boring and structural like that – so a lot of that has been put in in postproduction, with a separate narrator explaining everything that’s happening. I don’t love that – it feels like a missed opportunity to put more Banjo in the Banjo show. But it doesn’t detract from the nice makeovers, really, or the long cool shots of a glassy lake.
If this was all a psy-op to make me pack it all in and move to the Isle of Mull and re-train as someone who can do something with their hands, by the way, it’s working. Designing the Hebrides, with zooming drone shots of the wilds and high-definition views of clouds crashing across high mossy peaks, is an oddly gorgeous show that makes you truly envision a life where you own two thick jumpers, a loyal dog, and are the worst thing to happen to a small island’s social ecosystem since the Viking invasions.
“Tobermory has two seasons,” Banjo says, while painting a smokehouse ceiling a gorgeous sea-shade of blue, “June and winter.” Hmm, maybe not, then. Maybe I’ll just stay here and watch my special little head explosion shows.
