As most good Catholics know, the liturgical calendar goes: Advent, Christmas, Room to Improve, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time, Hammer Time. We are currently at the fourth Sunday of Room to Improve (RTÉ One). We’ve had four weeks now observing the Passion of the Bannon. His is the most familiar face in Ireland now that Ryan Tubridy has been removed from all photographs, like a Bolshevik in the 1930s.
Dermot Bannon is deeply concerned about the houses of Ireland and the people who live in them. He’s almost a figure of folklore these days, appearing to us all as a ghostly apparition moaning and bleeding from the eyes as we commit atrocities against light or space. (“But that’s the window in which I always pile my clothes, Dermot Bannon!” “But where else would we heap our old DVD boxes but in this narrow corridor leading to the kitchen, Dermot Bannon?” “I like having a very dark diningroom, Dermot Bannon.”)
Irish brains don’t even show up in an MRI machine unless they’re planning an extension
Yes, I’m basically saying Dermot Bannon is a Christ figure. He’s at his wit’s end with us, but he cares. In other countries they think property is a pragmatic consideration, “shelter” being just one item in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We just have one Maslow’s Need: an extension. We operate differently. Freud famously said that the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis*. Dermot Bannon demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that the Irish are not impervious to architecture. Indeed, Irish brains don’t even show up in an MRI machine unless they’re planning an extension.
(*Colleagues keep telling me that this story is apocryphal, but I think that just makes it more true, so I’m sticking with it.)
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Need to have a serious conversation with your spouse? Build an extension instead. Having an existential crisis brought on by retirement? Build an extension. Never really reckoned with the reality of those delightful children you thought you wanted? Build an extension. (That should hold them.) Basically, the joy of Room to Improve is sitting down each week, cracking your knuckles and saying, “Right, what’s wrong with these people?” (before looking ruefully at your own disappointing family and thinking, I should build an extension).
In the midst of a housing crisis, Room to Improve also feels like a good barometer of our national derangement. There’s something both decadent and revealing about the fact that people can think about poured-concrete floors and granite-topped kitchen islands at a time like this. Thus far in this year’s programmes we have had several people spending insane amounts of money that make no sense outside a dysfunctional housing market. Sometimes I feel they should replace the voiceover with some audio from Morgan Kelly circa 2008.
Of course, history is a circle. The people on Room to Improve have been radicalised by years of watching Room to Improve. Bannon is the Monolith to their bone-smashing apes. As people recount their plans to Bannon these days, they often seem to want an extension that he designed on another episode years ago. In those moments a haunted expression crosses Bannon’s face and he looks like Oppenheimer reckoning with the atomic bomb. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of below-code 1970s extensions,” he thinks, and then shows them some tiles.
(Where are we so far? Well, I’ve likened Dermot Bannon to Christ, Freud, the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Oppenheimer. And not one of you thinks I’ve gone too far, so I think it’s going very well.)
Much of each episode involves Bannon trying to talk a couple out of something they want because they’ve seen it elsewhere (in a local coffee shop, their sibling’s house, something designed by that chancer Dermot Bannon). We lack self-knowledge, and part of what Bannon brings to town is a reckoning with the self. Why do we want extensions? He is not just in the business of improving rooms but in the business of improving mankind, for the full Bannonisation of Ireland will only be possible come the fully actualised New Bannon Man. That’s just basic Marxism. He needs each of us to contemplate the extension within.
Children also appear on Room to Improve, but they tend to lurk in the background, sullenly preparing narratives for their therapists as their elders squander their inheritance
Bannon is also fighting a rearguard action against Ireland’s chintzy, shadowy past. Frequently he encourages us to turn our back on the old ways. For example, in the second episode of the series he opens up a freezing bungalow so it has views of the Rock of Cashel, which, it turns out, was right next door. Our ancestors generally felt we’d get sick of looking at nice views (“it’s just a rock”) and that our attentions were better focused inward, on our sins. If they could have got away with it they’d have had no windows at all.
There is a warmth to Room to Improve that evades many other property shows. In some ways you can watch each episode as a portrait of a couple lovingly etched into an open-plan kitchen. Different relationship dynamics are on display: a dyad of strong personalities; a talkative woman and a man who silently smiles; a talkative man and a woman who sighs. They’re all nice people.
In every couple there is one person who will become unreasonably fixated on a countertop or a poured-concrete floor or the colour of the tiles. This is probably the point at which Freud gave up on us. There are also those who cling to cash so hard that it turns into metamorphic rock, and those whose money bursts into flames as soon as Bannon crosses the county border. I mean, one family this season spent more than €600,000 renovating a three-bedroom house in Santry. I call this art installation the National Children’s Hospital.
Children also appear on Room to Improve, but they tend to lurk in the background, sullenly preparing narratives for their therapists as their elders squander their inheritance for a decorative pergola. The producers sometimes interview the kids, but they all just say the same thing: “When I turn 18, if humanity still exists, I’m putting my parents into a nursing home. Then I will spend what time I have left watching climate-change storms through the massive f***ing windows I have instead of money for food.”
There are three people in every marriage on Room to Improve if you include Bannon, and four if you include people at home for whom building extensions is a kink (all of us). The most erotic bits of Room to Improve are the sums and the bit where they assess if everyone involved came in on budget. We usually have, in fairness, though not always financially speaking. Then the extended family, Dermot Bannon, QS Claire and all the various craftspeople gather in the now perfected home and talk about how well everything worked. What else can they say? “I panicked about my mortality, and now I have a kitchen you could park a bus in”? It doesn’t matter. All of us at home just fold our arms in unison and respond as per the liturgy: “Isn’t it fine for some?” And then Room to Improve is over for another liturgical year.
