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By George: Clarke with one of his Amazing Spaces.
By George ... Clarke with one of his Amazing Spaces. Photograph: Channel 4
By George ... Clarke with one of his Amazing Spaces. Photograph: Channel 4

George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces: Grand Designs with a smile on its face

This article is more than 3 years old

Nine series in and Clarke’s self-build makeover show remains the happy alternative to Kevin McCloud’s wry forebear

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 (Wednesday 8 July, 9pm, Channel 4) is nine 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.

When he isn’t watching people learn to weld, George Clarke is in Chile, looking at buildings. When he’s not in Chile looking at buildings, he’s in a workshop with “my good friend Will”, History’s Most Erratically Dressed Man, who is explaining some building concept using a quirky illustrative prop (this week, two bike wheels rolling gently together; last week, an observatory made out of a melon). At the end, the bigger project gets the Grand Designian drone-camera-and-semi-pornographic-interior-shots treatment, and the couple – always so happy to see George, greeting him at the door with a Big Kiss, the dogs running raucous at his feet – whoop and laugh it up. George is a sunbeam and Kevin McCloud is a wry, knowing smile. Kevin McCloud enters buildings with the solemnity of a policeman about to tell you to sit down, please. George Clarke waltzes in as if he’s just done poppers.

It’s the end of the show, now. George is peering contemplatively over his shoulder. “It really is,” he says, and you know he’s going to say it, he’s been so positive all show long, “brilliant!”, George says, and “crikey!”, and “wow, fantastic!” and you know, just know that George loves it, he loved the idea of it and he loved the execution and now, wow, look, here it is, and here George is, and we’re all thriving, we’re all happy, we’re in an amazing space and we are alive.

“It really is an amazing space!” And then, one last time, he laughs. And you laugh with him.

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