Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the king of the MDF makeover, returns to our screens with Anna Richardson to create more spray-painted, gold-leafed visions from hell
I remember the time Linda Barker put up shelves to house a woman’s beloved teapot collection and they collapsed overnight, shattering every piece of china and the woman’s heart into a thousand pieces. I remember Anna Ryder Richardson framing unmistakeably French underwear to decorate the walls of a revamped room and the owner shouting, “Why would I want this shit in my room! I’ve got children!”
However. Those few minutes represent the full yield of genuine entertainment provided by 17 series of the makeover show Changing Rooms, which dominated the airwaves (a concept I’ll have to explain later, O infant roamers of the fragmented contemporary TV landscape) from 1996 to 2004. It was presented by Carol Smillie, who was tall and beautiful and owned all of Scotland’s teeth. Two sets of friends are allowed to redecorate a room in the other’s house with the help of designers such as the aforementioned Barker, Ryder Richardson and – above all – Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, along with “Handy Andy”, who led the carpenters, painters etc who did the actual work required to transfer the pure stupidity in their heads into three-dimensional stupidity that could be spray-painted and used to sit/sleep/cry on.
