Stephen Armstrong
2 for 1 tickets to Singin' In The Rain, this coming Monday. Book now
Watch a clip of Kevin McCleod on Grand Designs
Grand Designs defies television logic. Yes, people build dream projects on limited budgets, things go terribly wrong and they end up living in caravans when the builders disappear - but nobody is humiliated, arguments take second place to complex developments in materials science and, when hopes collapse, the camera turns its probing eyes away from the home-builders’ tears. Yet, since series four, the show has peaked at just under 6m viewers, in an era where The Bill earns 4.7m, Match of the Day 4.4m and The Weakest Link 4.6m. So successful is this gentle story-telling that Channel 4 has cleared its schedules for six days from tonight and handed several hours of peak time to Grand Designs Live. Unlike the placid format that has gone before, and usually takes 18 months to film, however, GDLive comes complete with explosions, cars driving over presenters and a race to build a house in a week. It’s like Top Gear meets Dr No - although, with Kevin McCloud at the helm, Q, rather than Bond, is the hero.
McCloud’s broad shoulders might seem an unlikely place for Channel 4 to rest its hopes. In these days of Heat magazine, overblown reality formats and naked celebrity divorces, he is earnest, enthusiastic and captivated by obscure detail. He empathises rather than mocks, champions green causes and community ideals, and describes his role on the show as being “like a Greek chorus - standing at the edge of the stage, translating the unfolding drama”. Yet he’s loving the bangs and crashes of GDLive, confessing himself a secret petrolhead (strictly speaking, his Saab and his Land Rover run on bioethanol and vegetable oil respectively, but you get the point).
Even though he’s battling man-flu when we meet, his eyes gleam with excitement as he describes his schemes for the show. “I’ve just been looking at a transparent gel that can give you a translucent wall that lights up, but insulates really well,” he bubbles. “Great - fantastic product. Put it in a building, that’s quite interesting. But dance a flame-thrower on it for three minutes and now we’re talking. So, part of the programme will be extreme testing. That involves hitting things, driving over them, blowing them up, putting them in chambers, cooking them, dumping them in the Thames - it’s very silly, very televisual. The last thing I want to be doing is talking about cushions. I’m not interested in cushions ... well, I am. I’m interested in setting fire to and destruction-testing cushions.”
McCloud’s co-star has always been the story: the unfolding human drama of a purpose-built home, with people’s lives filling the wall cavities. “We in urban Britain like stories about people building houses,” he agrees. “It’s the last great adventure we could all theoretically go on.” Good sentence, I say. “I’ve rehearsed that one,” he grins. Daisy Goodwin, the producer who plucked McCloud from his lighting-design practice to place him on Home Front and Grand Designs, pinpoints his appeal. “He’s a happily married father of four who loves adventure,” she argues. “Women love him; men want to have a pint with him. He’s the George Clooney of the small screen.” Indeed, last February, a female journalist practically had to be hauled away during an interview, gushing in print: “I have a bit of a pash on Mr McCloud ... he’s dishy in a lanky way... I love him for being passionate, knowledgeable, eloquent and everything TV presenters are not.”
Perhaps it’s his renaissance education. McCloud had half thought of heading out to Italy, to train as an opera baritone, but ended up at Cambridge, studying history of art and architecture. The opera singer surfaces when he delights in GDL’s live audience - “It’s showtime!” he squeaks - but in so many other ways, he is his father’s son. Donald McCloud was an engineer who hand-built the family home and, in 1969, when Kevin was only 10, woke his three sons at 4am to watch the moon landings. The young McCloud’s favourite evening was Thursday, when the family would gather in front of three crucial programmes: Tomorrow’s World, Top of the Pops and Horizon. “I’ve followed an arts career,” he begins, “but at the same time I’d solder electronics with my father, help him to mend the car, that kind of thing. It was quite normal for the boiler to be in bits on the kitchen table - or, for that matter, somebody else’s television. What I inherited from my father was curiosity about the world and how it works, but what comes with that is an absolute lack of fear or trepidation.”
He seems to have sparked a television trend - with Stephen Fry’s QI, Jonathan Meades on surrealism, Andrew Marr’s historical lectures and the two Snows discussing obscure battles, we seem to be on the verge of a breathless, overenthusiastic, post-Reithian dumbing up. Intelligent types stride about or sit in gameshow studios, displaying the kind of knowledge that would have been laughed off the screen a few short years ago. The energy, the pace and the adventure - it’s as if John Noakes were suddenly in charge of the schedules. McCloud even refuses to mention brand names in his product-heavy show, preferring the generic to any casual endorsement. “It’s how I was brought up,” he explains, conjuring up the soldering schoolboy again. “It’s the DNA of Tomorrow’s World and Blue Peter. I even called something ‘sticky-back plastic’ the other day,” he laughs through his clotted nose. “Now that’s proper Blue Peter, isn’t it?”
Grand Designs Live starts tonight at 8.05pm on Channel 4
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I would really like to see Kevin McCloud campaign against bad architecture in the UK, from bland suburban developments to ugly new office blocks - perhaps he could do for architecture what Jamie Oliver did for school dinners
also another presenter to add to that list should be Tim Marlow on Five
Mark, Reading, UK