Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about
George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces: Grand Designs with a smile on its face
My favourite thing about George Clarke, a strong set of teeth with a man from Sunderland wrapped round it, is that he laughs on camera. Nobody laughs on TV. Nobody. Watch, now. Go put the telly on. You don’t see people laugh, you don’t hear them. Loose Women you get a laugh, sometimes, if Coleen Nolan is in the mood, but that’s about it. Except, boom: George Clarke’s here, laughing it up. Ha ha ha, he says. I am George Clarke. This space is amazing.
George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces is ten series old now, but you wouldn’t know it, because it isn’t Grand Designs. Well, it is Grand Designs: George Clarke meets a comfortably middle-class couple who have a young daughter; George Clarke goes inside their house and sees it in its raw, demolished, undesigned form; George Clarke voiceovers a 3D rendering of how the house will look, eventually; George Clarke makes a second visit on a hideously rainy day; George Clarke interrogates the couple at the end of the build, two significant haircuts later, asking how much they went over spend. In those ways, it is exactly Grand Designs. But it isn’t Grand Designs, because Kevin McCloud isn’t here – the voice of death at the door – and George Clarke is, and he’s got a hammer, and he’s laughing. George Clarke’s getting mucky, today. And you’re going to love it.
There is a lot going on in Amazing Spaces. The firm structure is: George Clarke will watch two projects unfold, one normally quite stupid and throwaway – there are, at any one time, at least 20 retired men in Britain doing something unutterably bizarre with an old vehicle, and George Clarke is there to watch them all – and one more on the aspirational, dream-home level.
And as always have a chilled day from the Viking.
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