Any attempt to revive the Nineties is always futile. No matter how many Friends reunions and bucket hats there are out there, there’s no going back.
We are now entirely new people, with new brains and new ideas and new machines. Liam Gallagher is an old man, Kurt Cobain has been dead longer than he was alive and staple-gunning fun fur to a sheet of MDF and No More Nailsing it on to the wall of a semi-detached house in Derby is now considered a hate crime.
Nobody has told this to the producers of Changing Rooms, however, which has decamped (camp being the operative word) to Channel 4, and brought a brand new bag of hideous interiors tricks with it.
Like the living rooms it once merrily dismantled, the cast of designers and presenters has altered beyond recognition. Carol Smillie probably couldn’t hit ‘delete’ fast enough on the email from her agent, Handy Andy has bitten the dust and instead of Anna Ryder-Richardson – who exuded chaotic posh-girl-on-a-gap-year-in-Goa energy – we have Naked Attraction’s Anna Richardson, the go-to for any show involving stripped chests and shiny knobs.
We know the script now. The anarchic derangement is gone
There was some redemption in the form of Changing Rooms OG Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, who appeared out of nowhere in a pair of squeaky-looking leather trousers, lounging like an opium fiend on the wipe-clean DFS sofa of a woman called Claire in Swansea.
Claire’s friends and neighbours, Kirsty and Lisa, were on a mission to get rid of her beige living room, but pink was off limits. “We are travelling to the Floating Palace of Udaipur,” Laurence announced grandly, twizzling his moustache, then proceeded to paint it flamingo pink, put a blue rattan sex swing in the middle of the room and create a door with HIS FACE ON IT.
