Grand Designs

I think we can all agree there are moments in life when you realise the way you feel about things has changed.  Never has this been truer than during the year we’ve just had.  The thought of running around London attending various meetings, squeezing on Tubes and touching everything, then staying out all evening shedding cash on food and drink with pals sounds quite frankly like a dream come true.  A year ago, I would much rather have been ensconced in my flat, dressed in slacks and watching trash on the big telly.  But after twelve months of that, I feel like a social butterfly ready to obliterate my chrysalis and say yes to doing anything, as long as it is outside of my flat.  I’ve even got myself vaccinated (childhood asthma on my GP records saw me texted early and taking the jab when offered seemed like the most straightforward path – if you don’t agree, I am happy to arrange to spit in your mouth in order to share immunity… pretty sure that’s how it works) and, in fact, leaving the house for that was a great day out.

In other changes, I never thought I would feel I wanted to watch Grand Designs.  Any programming about property was a huge turn off, mostly because I spent eleven years saving in order to own one of my, er, own.  During that time, I was at the mercy of the rentals market, from the highs of making new lifelong besties out of flatmates, to the lows of being asked to leave after six months by a woman who once took herself to A&E due to constipation.  The prospect of privileged boomers spending untold cash on their own gratification held no appeal.  But then, I finally got my own flat, and then it became my prison.  Sure, it’s filled very tastefully with an interior scheme that is half John Lewis, half too many houseplants and sure, it’s in zone two among all the things (that are shut), but, as the upstairs neighbours stamp and shriek literally while I type this (and who can blame them as they are stuck in too), I’ve been wondering about finding my way to more space, to something further away from other (stamping and shrieking) people.  And this led me to Grand Designs.  Maybe the time has come for some inspiration about my next house.

Let me just confess that, unlike most of shows these endless posts cover, I haven’t actually seen all of Grand Designs.  There’s nothing to stop me watching all 210 episodes, but all my rambling here is based on three full episodes from the latest series and then an array of snatched snippets when I’ve happened to catch a few moments of the programme over the last 21 years.  But I do know the format, and it’s exactly that which makes it a show you don’t really want to dip in and out of: it’s all set up, tease and big reveal.

First, we meet our grand designers.  They are wealthy.  Not to look at though, and often half the fun is wondering how Jerome and Valentina earned hundreds of thousands of pounds trading rare fur gilets in semirural Hertfordshire.  Either way, they’ve decided to abandon the rat race (or to move into a caravan when one of them is pregnant) and design and build their own house.  And they want us, the viewer, to watch them do it.  It’s the insta humble brag, but make it self-unaware.  Casting judgment on our behalf is Kevin McCloud.  His job is to be a man that knows about buildings and his opinions on them.  Jerome and Valentina tell him about their dreams and he tilts and manoeuvres his head to demonstrate that he is listening, giving the impression he can only process certain sounds if his ears are at certain corresponding angles.  Yet this doesn’t diminish his undeniable charm.  Even when he proceeds to be rude.  He tells them their dreams sound unrealistic.  Then he asks them how much.  It’s a great moment if your pastime is watching people with old money squirm, or people with new money froth at the chance to flash their cash.

Then we get an 3D CGI illustration of the plans.  This is the bit I always want more of.  We never find out more about the exact reasons behind each room.  We focus on one thing instead: it’s all about the light, the heating, the carbon neutrality.  Everything else is rushed past: and then here’s where all the bedrooms and bathrooms are but they haven’t got any floors or windows and there’s no time to explain.  And with that, off we go.  Handy dates on screen remind us that the show takes years to film and we settle into the portion about how they did the foundations.  This shouldn’t be interesting, but we’re all willing things to go wrong and they inevitably do.  Often, to save money, Jerome will pour his own concrete, despite wearing his helmet backwards, and it’s enjoyable to watch the workmen roll their eyes at him, his entitlement and his inexperience.  There’ll be drama that you can’t actually see: if the foundations crack then everything will be ruined and it will cost fifty grand.

The family waiting to move in are shivering in the drizzle under a tarpaulin round the back, but Jerome is standing proud not giving a fig while his vision becomes a reality.  Valentina waits until she can pick out the curtains.  We check in over the months, with Kevin sometimes popping along to tell them off for removing period features (if they are renovating an old building) or expressing disbelief that a heating system powered by Jerome and Valentina’s own sense of smugness will ever function properly (it bloody will).  You’ll marvel at Kevin’s outerwear – his whole house must be filled with sensible jackets.  Lots more stuff can go wrong and the schadenfreude is deeply satisfying.  The latest series has the added tension of us counting down until lockdown hits them, knowing what’s in store while they naively plan their progress.

Suddenly, though, we swing the windows into place (careful!) and everything is finished.  The rainy shell is gone.  We are looking at the actual home.  It’s behind schedule, but we go from pointing and laughing at the grand designers’ misfortune to seething envy that they get to live somewhere so cool.  I would observe that we see the “finished” item too soon after completion.  I want to see it two years later when the French windows are covered in the children’s greasy fingerprints and someone’s chipped the plasterwork with the vacuum cleaner.  Kevin marvels at the ingenuity, rinsing the thesaurus to find just the right words to sum up the achievement, before a final stab in the shape of asking how much it all cost then after all that.  Through clenched teeth, we’re told about the casual one hundred grand over budget that was spent, wondering where on earth this money came from (and what it went on).  How do you secure a loan from a bank when it’s to fund Valentina’s underground crystal craft cave?  Was it worth it that Jerome hand-tickled a million metro tiles to create an impractical kitchen?

You’re left feeling inspired, though.  If money were no object, which bits would you take to fashion your own dream abode?  Kevin admits they’ve triumphed and we kick ourselves that we don’t and never will earn enough.  I normally like to think about what else they could have spent the money on.  Being Brits of a certain age, most of them should probably have prioritised some orthodontics.  But what if they had scaled back the ambition just a touch?  What if a few hundred pounds were freed up?  What if Jerome, instead of gratifying himself with gold-plated bathtubs, got the silver-plated ones instead and funded a family’s broadband bill so they could alleviate disruption to disadvantaged children’s educations?  After all this, that’s the other thing we might be starting to feel differently about.

Love Island USA

In a roller coaster year of dizzying highs and terrifying lows, I’m going to point the finger at ITV2 for being both the cause of and the solution to a large number of these peaks and troughs.  As we all know, the calendar year is built around Love Island.  Normally those wonderful weeks of coupling up each night with an hour of guaranteed good telly (apart from the oddly unengaging Saturday night highlights/unseen shows) synchronise with our British summers of torrential downpours and sticky sticky heatwaves (both of which give everyone a first-hand experience of our climate crisis future), but 2020 got off to a great start with an absolute glut of Majorcan madness thanks to the inaugural series of winter Love Island.

But then, as we all know, pandemic pandemonium took hold and nobody knew how to make a show about cracking on if contestants had to remain two metres apart, not to mention the indecipherable lottery that foreign travel had become.  With a shrug, the whole series was cancelled and my life was ruined.  Then, it was divulged there would be no further winter edition in 2021, meaning it was over a year till the next UK series.  I can cope with supermarket queues and remote working under the threat of redundancy, but this was a major gut punch.  Naturally, I blamed Boris.  Naturally, he blamed immigration.  Surely Love Island 2020 could go ahead if everyone claimed they were testing their eyesight?

ITV redeemed themselves by screening Love Island Australia and, even though it was an old series, it was the vape to the cigarette of my Love Island addiction.  But then someone had the bright idea of taking Love Island USA and giving it to us in real time, allowing a glorious watch-along with our American brethren – it turns out our special relationship extends beyond a catastrophic covid response and being led by privileged petulant blonde fatties.  Of course, I stopped for half a second to wonder how on earth the States were going to run a reality dating show which involves the liberal exchanging of bodily fluids (orally, mostly) in the midst of a world health emergency.

Apparently, the islanders quarantined before entering the villa, ensuring a negative test for the virus.  More importantly, while a luxury island was out of the question, the perfect solution was found in a Las Vegas rooftop.  Offering hot weather and the constant background hum of downtown traffic (interspersed with sirens), the producers had struck gold.  In fact, so much of Love Island’s much-needed escapism comes from its almost complete refusal to engage with the outside world.  There were some initial comments about lockdown, but our couples soon became the truly insular islanders we would expect.  Sure, we’re all sick of corona, but the absence of a single mention of Black Lives Matter among a group of diverse young people seems like a missed opportunity.  Even Justine opening up about her family’s time in a Kenyan refugee camp barely warranted more than a few seconds of screen time when I could happily have watched a one-hour special on the subject.

But, if to Love-Island is to act as if the outside world doesn’t matter, then this series of Love Island USA is serving up pure escapism with our perception of reality deliberately removed.  The pandemic doesn’t matter.  The centuries of racial oppression don’t matter.  The climate crisis doesn’t matter.  All that matters is finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend, as being single is the greatest travesty of all.  But, whereas 2019’s season of Love Island USA made the competition to couple up all too obvious, taking the more American approach to reality TV (ruthless game-planning), this new version has realised that a lot of the format’s charm lies in sticking closely to the silliness of the UK original.  At last, we have an irreverent voiceover, mocking every single thing our island young folk get up to.  A glamorous host wonders in on the odd occasion with bad news.  People shout out “got a text!”  The ridiculous challenges have been shipped over and acted out blow by blow (literally), while Casa Amor was a resounding triumph, descending quickly into explosive orgiastic debauchery and creating great telly.  I shall hand it to the Americans – they are TV naturals.  Unlike the Brits, they take themselves a touch more seriously and are better at articulating their emotions, and they will never shy away from a cheesy Hollywood moment with no sense of irony, but the senses of humour are there, alongside the budding friendships you want to join in with.  Of particular note this season is the island girls’ predilection for slipping suddenly into outrageous British accents to ask each other: “Are you alriiiight?”  This contrasts delightfully with their otherwise as-apple-pie American accents and is a healthy reminder of how stupid British people must sound abroad.  And at home.

Of course, the teeth are whiter, but the bikinis and trunks are no tighter.  Some bits are different, some are the same, but it’s enough to tide me over in my lockdown (will we, won’t we) viewing.  Sometimes it’s nice not to hear the T word (Trump) or to see human beings experience social contact without a curtain-twitching neighbour tutting.  And if you’re looking for pure joy, I recommend Cely from this year’s cohort.  Her constant ray of positivity starts every morning when she jumps out of bed with glee while her co-islander squint and groan, before she goes on to tackle every challenge and tribulation with laughter and good humour.  As the final approaches it will be interesting to see what American viewers make of her relationship with Johnny and whether they rate it over the slower and steadier Justine and Caleb.  All I know is I’ll be sorry again when it’s all over, but maybe there’s another international version of Love Island I can distract myself with.

 

Love Island Australia

To what extent is showing a 2018 season of Love Island Australia an adequate replacement for a new series of summer Love Island in the UK?

While this is a question I could ask ITV, it’s actually the essay question I have set myself for this week’s blog entry.  No, sadly I’ve not completed an impressive foreign boxset that I’m going to tell you all about this week (though a third and final series of Dark has dropped).  So we’re turning to what is fast becoming my favourite lockdown viewing.  Let’s be honest, this pandemic has a lot to answer for.  We’re not allowed to have strangers invade our personal space on public transport.  We can’t spend all day in an office wondering what the dog is doing while we’re not home.  We can no longer speculate whether our elected (no, really) government could cope with a national crisis (they can’t).  These are all things we can live with (or without).  But when ITV pointed out that a socially-distanced version of our favourite reality dating show might not fulfil our expectations (you can’t watch a couple under a twitching duvet via night vision if they have to be two metres apart), all while having no clue whether foreign travel would be in any way possible, it felt like the final straw.  This pandemic might just be a bad thing.

However, in a stroke of genius, they decided to whack on another nation’s first series, probably reasoning it was close enough.  The good news about Australia is that we’re super familiar with it.  It doesn’t suffer from the gloss of the US’s TV output (the scripted dramas, I mean, not the dross of their political news).  Generations of Brits grew up on Ozzie soaps – every weekday dinner of mine after primary school in the early 90s was accompanied by Home & Away and Neighbours.  We swap our populations back and forth, nowhere more so than in the media industry (where I work (from home)).  Australiana is pretty easy to get used to.  In addition, the Australian version has all the familiarity of also being filmed in Majorca.  Not in the same villa, mind, but near enough.  I’m struck by the imagined statistic that 80% of this Balearic island’s GDP comes from various nations filming their versions of Love Island on it.  These two points made Love Island Australia a much more obvious choice than the US version, whose departures from key format points and inclusion of actual Americans means it loses all the charm of the original.

Alongside the classic setting, we also have the characteristically irreverent voiceover, though the Celt of choice here is an Irishman instead of a Scot.  The stray cats that visit the villa provide most of the ammo for his humour but I think we can all agree there is nothing funnier than a cat.  Just look at the reason for the internet’s invention: cat videos.  We also have a glamorous hostess entering the villa with bad news for the couples at random junctures.  Sadly, we lost the UK’s OG presenter earlier this year after our vile tabloids hounded Caroline Flack to her death yet faced no consequences, with Laura Whitmore taking over from her dear friend.  In the Australian version, former popstar Sophie Monk proves a feisty equivalent, and her antipodean vowels are so wonderful that I can’t help but suspect she may be a new character from Kath & Kim.  There are still texts with hashtags in them.  In summary, it’s similar enough then…

So, in order to answer the question (and if I learnt anything from GCSE it’s that’s you must make sure you answer the question) we need to look at the contestants.  This was perhaps my greatest stumbling block when it came to convincing myself that I had been provided with a worthy replacement.  They didn’t do much to grab me in the first episode, though the girls’ reluctance to step forth for anyone at all was amusing.  There was a major lack of diversity.  But then, with any season, it takes a few days to marinade and, before long, I began to look forward to catching up on the previous night’s shenanigans with all my new pals after a videocall-heavy day at the laptop.

Somehow, then, this can become an adequate replacement.  But there are certain rules that I must impart when it comes to being able to enjoy it as much as a brand new series of our own.  The first is that you mustn’t look ahead online to find out what the future held in store for these young Australians who are so full of hope in 2018.  To do so would deflate any of the tension that makes the show so compelling.  The second is that you need to attune to a different vibe on the behaviour.  So far, the Australian girls have proven much quicker to attack one another, never hiding their mutual dislike (split along hair colour lines) which, while a contrast to the British besties that emerge, is actually palatable as a more honest approach to the villa’s interpersonal relationships.  The boys seem to be predominantly from the socio-economic group that Australians describe as bogan, but on the whole are a slightly gruffer and less flamboyant equivalent of our own tattooed chaps.

I’ll conclude my essay with the answer to my own question.  Love Island Australia is quite an adequate replacement, offering charm and entertainment in its own way.  To illustrate, we’ll touch on my favourites of each gender.  From the boys, it’s Josh who, while one of the slenderer and under-tattoeed specimens, wins out consistently on personality simply because he speaks with the authority of someone who knows that confidence is the same as, if not better than, intelligence.  When the boys ask him for wisdom, he’s happy to fabricate his responses with the hilarious consequence that they almost always believe him.  From the girls, it’s Millie.  Shrugging off any nonsense from those of her own gender when it comes to disagreements, she’s practical and resilient, and would much rather be writhing around in the pool on an inflated flamingo than getting into arguments.  Wouldn’t we all.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness

Let’s discuss captivity.  It certainly seems like the right time for it.  The UK has been under lockdown since the start of this week, and I’ve been on enforced working from home for over a fortnight.  No gym, no haircuts, no socialising and no food in the supermarkets: welcome to my first pandemic.  But, in all this, perspective must remain a constant companion.  I have a job and a home I can do it from, so things could be much worse.  I live in a wealthy country with an infrastructure that might just about be able to cope (if we all stay in), which is more than can be said for billions of other people around the world.  All I must undergo is some temporary hardship.  I must confine myself to my brand-new new build.  I forego physical contact with all friends and family.  But thanks to the internet, I have unlimited entertainment and education at my fingertips.  I can and shall occupy myself while counting those blessings.  And it is indeed this same blessed internet (and its bedfellow, Netflix) that has brought something incredibly entertaining to the UK’s captive audience in recent weeks: Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

It's occupied our number one spot for some time now, so, like a rampant infection, it was only natural that I too should fall to its appeal.  In fact, those seven episodes formed something of an uncharacteristically irresistible binge for me.  I devoured them all in a matter of days.  I suppose I do have more spare time as I can’t go outside (beyond my single government-approved exercise window per day – thanks gammon-in-charge Bozza), but I just had to know what was going to happen next and what possible conclusion it could all draw to.  The colon in its title is a pointless adornment; they had me at Tiger King.  Big felines have long filled me with terror, despite being a flag-waving cat person from a cat family, with only indifference for dogs and mostly antipathy for their owners (with many exceptions).  As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of being trapped in Chessington World Of Adventures, desperate to drag my family away from the lion enclosure before they emitted deadly roars – yes, I was more scared of their barks than their bites.  A recent trip to South Africa saw me taken to a lion park by cousins I hadn’t seen for 27 years.  Rather than try and front a brave-man act as the pride chased our vehicle to the exit, I totally lost my cool and even refused to open my door (or take off my seatbelt) once we were all clear of the safety barrier.  I love wildlife, but will from now on only encounter the dangerous ones via a screen on Our Planet or Seven Worlds, One Planet.

However, I can’t resist the constant tension of some stupid human sitting next to a deadly tiger or lion without any protection beyond their own sense of ego.  It makes for a fascinating Louis Theroux documentary (2011’s America’s Most Dangerous Pets) which features scenes that still haunt me, mostly because Theroux was so visibly uncomfortable around dangerous animals.  And rightly so.  Here we are, years later, dealing with the same character at the heart of the same subject: Joe Exotic (Schreibvogel-Maldonado-Passage).  If the ever-present threat of a mauling isn’t compelling enough, our Joe has all the qualities that render any viewer physically incapable of wrestling their eyes from the screen.  Redneck and proud of it, Exotic boasts a peroxided mullet, cowboy tassels and a multitude of other adornments that scream attention-grabbing.  Some piercings dangle sadly, his middle-aged skin’s elasticity the victim of smoking, sunshine and drugs, yet we can only imagine the state of his Prince Albert as he takes us through his collection of weighty padlocks for attaching to it on an impromptu tour of his very untidy bedroom.  Part The Office’s David Brent (for the music videos alone), part S-Town’s John B. McLemore (only with a manifestly lower IQ), Exotic is the gun-totin’ ringmaster of an Oklahoma petting zoo.  Only these aren’t bunnies and ponies, these are lions and tigers (and their curious dual-heritage offspring, ligers).

Guests are protected by nothing more than Exotic’s own self-belief – and it’s powerful stuff.  It convinces him to run for state governorship and for president.  It guides his acoustic tastes – the only music he likes to listen to is his own.  It propels him to celebrate a three-man marriage in a very conservative state.  It renders him impervious to animal rights groups that advise that maybe you shouldn’t breed tiger cubs simply for sale as pets, or for stroking by punters until they’re too old to be cute and are euthanised, that you shouldn’t feed them out-of-date supermarket meat and roadkill, that you shouldn’t confine them to cages.  Thus arises the key narrative of the documentary series: Exotic’s primal rivalry with fellow big pussy fan and arch-nemesis, that lovely flower garland-wearing, slow-cycling Carole Baskin down in Florida (“Hey all you cool cats and kittens”).  She mandates that these animals shouldn’t be petted, or bred for petting, or kept in captivity at all.  Running a sanctuary for rescue animals, she inspires her social followers to join her in pressuring Exotic and his pals to right their wrongs.

She might sound angelic, but one of the most delicious parts of Tiger King is not knowing who’s worse.  Rumours circle Baskins like lions stalking prey.  What happened to her very wealthy first husband?  How and why did he disappear?  Why didn’t his family get anything?  Are the rumour true that she fed his body to her tigers?  Most evil of all, she runs her park using unpaid volunteers only (Exotic pays his in petty cash and trailer-park living) and masks her origins in captive cat breeding, though she is very open about her incredibly ironic cat allergies.  In her tit-for-tat conflict with Exotic, you sit there paralysed about who to root for.  The answer is neither.

Instead, you can dismiss them both on the quality that unites them: their complete lack of taste.  From leopard-print leggings (well, leopard-print everything) to neck tattoos, big cat people are drawn to anything tacky.  It evidences their pursuit of status: you can swing no bigger dick than having the king of the jungle as a house pet.  Most sinister of these egos is Bhagavan “Doc” Antle.  Proving correct the theory you should never trust a man who has a soul patch and a pony tail, polygamist Antle is not (yet, at least) directly embroiled in the feud-propelled crimes at the heart of Tiger King, merely commenting as an onlooking character witness.  Yet his passion for attention drives some of the best humour in this otherwise serious matter, directing the documentary team to feature him only in the most flattering of set-ups.  His ego is more fragile than the tigers’ natural habitats.

I’ll finish up by considering the most compelling moment in the whole thing.  I was going to focus on the footage of Exotic getting dragged around a cage by the foot after some cologne on his shoe prompts an aggressive reaction from one of his big cats.  In a split second, the underlying tension bursts to the surface and we are seconds from death.  Or there’s the moment his campaign manager witnesses a colleague die, with his reaction captured on CCTV.  This will chill you.  But the winning moment is in fact the footage of “businessman” James Garretson thinking he looks cool while doing water sports.  For some reason, there is nothing more compelling than a fat man with a bad haircut on a jetski.

Let’s be honest, Tiger King is fairly exploitative, delivering up white trash on a stick, but I couldn’t get enough of it.  Some more intriguing details are cruelly glanced over: what exactly happened to Saff’s arm, why does Exotic have a knee support, why is John Finlay topless for most of his interviews, what happened in Jeff Lowes’ Las Vegas petting van etc?  Instead, way is made for endless footage of big cats receiving questionable treatment, enough that you eventually feel almost disappointed that there aren’t more scenes of humans being attacked.  Not because you wish ill on any member of the public, but because these big cat people are clearly the most dangerous predators in the animal world.  Maybe it’s time for them to experience some of this captivity first hand.