I am starting to feel sorry for Channel 4, because they are never going to make a property show I like, no matter how many times they try. This is simply because of the economic reality I live in – I don’t own property and I’m starting to think I never will, thanks woke – and that makes it grating and tedious to watch other people on TV build houses, or renovate houses, or Grand Design their houses. They tried with George Clarke, but I loathed him. They tried with Kevin McCloud and, while I like and fear Kevin, I hated anyone he ever interacted with on screen (“Heh, yeah: I’m going to do the barn myself” – go to work!). They did that show where Sarah Beeny lives in the countryside and I quite liked it as long as I didn’t think about it too much. But, fundamentally, I will always struggle to find interesting what someone did with their kitchen.
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, then, a final roll of the dice, who this week takes us around a series of outrageous homes in Outrageous Homes (20 June, 10pm, Channel 4). To qualify as an outrageous home you basically have to decorate in a way that when people come over they say this sentence out loud: “Wow, yeah – you’ve done a lot here, haven’t you?”, and every week we get six of them. Episode one takes us into a £5m mansion made in the eternal honour of Treasure Island; a western-themed garden made out of junk; a groovy homage to the 70s; a make-do-and-mend festival of colour; an almost but not totally mosaicked house; and a semi-frightening house turned aquarium. Llewelyn-Bowen goes to about 60% of these houses, lets a second unit deal with the rest, and has an enormous amount of fun just not really caring about it at all.
I, for one, welcome the Llewelyn-Bowennaissance. In the 90s we didn’t really know what to do with him – smooth model face, ruffled shirt cuffs, calling Shakespeare “the Bard”: has anyone like this existed before! – but watching him bully Handy Andy into ruining a succession of people’s living rooms was one of the best things on TV. Then he went low for a bit, did a lot of formats that started with the word Celebrity, grew a resplendent goatee and started posing with his hands really firmly on his hips. But what LLB does, like almost nobody alive, is have an absurd, vampy amount of fun on camera. His iconic “It’s Larry!” entrance from the reboot of Changing Rooms a couple of years ago is just a taste of what he brings to Outrageous Homes: the first line of voiceover in the series is “Hail, glorious people of the United Kingdom!” He describes the show as “a celebratory frolic” through the nation’s front rooms; he keeps making homeowners pose with him in absurd still situations while he throws to an ad break; he does a to-camera piece in a chip shop (why?) which starts with the pleasingly erratic sentence “Hobbies: discuss!”. When I was in Year 9 we had a few classes with a substitute teacher who was clearly in the midst of a mental lapse where he no longer cared at all about geography, and Llewelyn-Bowen is bringing a lot of that energy to the screen (that’s a compliment).
Which is exactly what a show such as Outrageous Homes needs. In the wrong hands, this would be a too-bombastic riposte to the modern trend of grey Live-Laugh-Love living rooms, a tooted-horn manifesto to throw the rules out of the window, buy a bath on eBay, have a really untidy garden, live! LLB doesn’t really care about making a point: he leans on things, interrupts homeowners as they tell you what that plant pot used to be, points to things on ceilings. What you are made aware of very early on is you’re going to have to spend a lot of time with the people who have outrageous homes, and they are very often unoutrageous, and Llewelyn-Bowen is going to do nothing to help them with that but tempers that energy adroitly. But primarily Outrageous Homes is a portrait of a certain kind of British homeowner: dyes their hair as a personality trait, self-describes as “bonkers”, thinks the carrier bag charge was a reasonable compromise. Llewelyn-Bowen wafts into their house, holds a hand to his lip, asks how long it took them to do that to the kitchen table, leaves again. It’s really enjoyably stupid. It took you a while, Channel 4, but you might finally have made property TV for me. Thanks!
