Your Home in their Hands is one of the cruellest shows on TV
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Version 0 of 1. It’s easy enough to tell whether a television programme belongs on primetime or daytime. Is it about auctions? Daytime. Science? Primetime. Do people get paternity tests at the end of every episode? Daytime. Does it star Sheridan Smith? Primetime. Is Phillip Schofield in it? Daytime. What about if he’s wearing a sparkly suit? Primetime. Is it a home makeover show? That’s even easier – if Nick Knowles features somehow, it’s primetime. If not, there’s a perfect slot for it between Rip Off Britain and Saints and Scroungers. And yet, when handed Your Home in their Hands – the brightest, daytimeiest daytime home makeover show that has ever been made – BBC1 stuck it on air at 8pm, smack-dab in the middle of the primetime schedule. The only possible explanation for this is that the BBC wanted to scare Britain’s workforce out of taking any more unnecessary sick days. After all, who’d want to spend all morning on the sofa if this is the sort of guff they have to sit through? Everything about Your Home in their Hands (the second episode airs on Thursday) is a little off. Its premise – two tone-deaf amateur designers wreck a stranger’s house in the name of artistry – is a weird throwback to the bad old days of Changing Rooms. The host, Four Rooms dealer Celia Sawyer, is essentially the Martian woman from Mars Attacks updated to wear clothes the colour of sunburn and talk in a gratingly mechanical approximation of sarcasm, as if Stephen Hawking’s voice machine had been accidentally set to “Dave Lamb”. The interior designers all have a slightly desperate air about them, as if they had previously been turned down by both Big Brother and Come Dine with Me and saw this as their last big shot at TV glory. The biggest problem with Your Home in their Hands, though, is its tone. While cruelty is still a perfectly valid form of entertainment if executed correctly, this is cruel in a way that makes it feel a decade out of date. It belongs in an age where Anne Robinson was the world’s most famous dominatrix and Simon Cowell still remembered how to land a punch. Nestled between Gordon Ramsay at his most belligerent and The Apprentice when it was still good, Your Home in their Hands would have slotted in perfectly. Because the point of the programme, the money shot of the whole thing, is the moment when the victims see how badly their kitchen has been wrecked. At no point during an episode does anyone even get close to expressing genuine happiness – first the homeowners are downtrodden, then the host is stern, then the designers are aggressively confident, then the host is stern again, then the homeowners cry, then one of the designers cries, then the homeowners cry again, then the host dispassionately stares at the camera until it all gets a bit uncomfortable and you switch off. That’s it. That’s the entire show. You’re never fully clear who’s being more mercilessly exploited – the homeowners, the designers or you – but you’re pretty sure that someone is, and it doesn’t leave a particularly nice taste in the mouth. Times have changed. Tastes have moved on. If people watch home makeover shows at all now, it’s because they want to be emotionally obliterated by the heartwarming story of a community working together, not because they enjoy seeing idiots being goaded by a mean-spirited woman in a horrible leather skirt. Only three episodes of Your Home in Their Hands have been made, which suggests that the BBC simply wants to see if it can get away with putting daytime shows on at night. On this evidence, it cannot. |