TV Review: Kirstie's Homemade Home

By Jeremy Clay

Poor old Phil Spencer. First his business goes belly-up, a victim of the housing collapse that price-inflating property shows like Location, Location, Location helped induce. Now his TV sidekick has gone solo.

I suppose that makes him the Andrew Ridgeley of the pair. But Kirstie Allsopp may find she needs Phil rather more than she imagined.

In Location³, she’s brusque, overbearing and matronly, but her Thatcher-like traits are largely softened by the emollient presence of Spencer.

In Kirstie’s Homemade Home (8pm, Channel 4), she’s served up neat, like a great gulp of undiluted squash. Yuk.

In these downturned times, she’s turned her back on flogging houses.

Instead, she’s telling us how to make do and mend, like one of those wartime information films where well-to-do ladies showed you how to turn your husband’s old slippers into a rather fetching hat.

The result’s a bit Martha Stewart, a bit Gok’s Fashion Fix and a bit Why Don’t You? It’s also a bit patronising.

Make your own cushions, she suggests. Craft your pots. Fish furniture out of skips.

Above all, curb your spending. All sound advice, you may think, but a little hard to take from the daughter of the sixth Baron Hindlip, whose parental pile appears to feature a lake.

The show is built on the shaky foundations of a gimmick.

Kirstie’s bought a near-derelict house in Devon at auction and plans to do it up week by week, starting with the kitchen.

So where to begin with a wreck of a room with no fixtures, no fittings and an urgent need of the attentions of a builder, plasterer and electrician?

Exactly. The crockery.

Kirstie paid a visit to a ceramics studio and learned how to make  pots.

Then she went to a glassblower and made her own tumblers. Perhaps you could do all that, too, if you had a handsomely-paid TV job that left you with plenty of free afternoons.

Oddly, though, these were the bits that worked best of all – heartfelt tributes to the skills of Britain’s artisans that made you itch to have a go.

But Kirstie has an unfortunate knack for snapping you back to rude reality.

“You don’t have to go abroad to find great stuff,” she advised. That’s a relief, eh readers?

To prove it, she went skipping, which apparently means poking about in builders’ bins.

Recycle, recycle, recycle, that’s her new mantra

She found a mirror she seemed chuffed with. “Skipping is the ultimate in environmental friendliness,” she beamed.`

On that thoughtful note, she changed gear in her 4x4 Land Rover, and headed back to Chelsea.