The challenge facing the modern Irish property show is to serve up an hour or so of cheery entertainment while keeping utter hopelessness at bay. That’s a tall order, considering the circumstances. The housing shortage has become the great existential crisis of our day – an unwelcome follow-up to the unemployment scourge of the 1980s and the “oops, there goes the banking sector” woes of the post-Bertie Ahern Götterdämmerung.
All of which will one day make for a fascinating history book/ Reeling In The Years episode. In the here and now, however, it presents a major impediment for the glorified comfort watching that is Hugh Wallace’s The Great House Revival (RTÉ One, Sunday, 9.30pm).
Misery isn’t Wallace’s thing: he’s the jolly face of Irish interior design, always with a bounce in his step, an interesting pattern sploshed across his shirt, his Elton John glasses twinkling cheerily. Asking him to factor in the nuclear winter sweeping through the property market is a bit like bringing Daniel O’Donnell on to discuss the defensive crisis at Real Madrid – by all means have at it, but it just isn’t going to work out very well.
Against this backdrop of general misery, there is, then, an inevitable sense of fish out of water as the Great House Revival opens its new season with a trip to Butlerstown in west Cork. Here Timmie O’Brien and wife Siobhán are planning the restoration of an old shop and post office on the main street.
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They have big dreams – and a modest budget. So modest that they had to put the brakes on when the cost of raw materials soared post-pandemic. Enter the reliably chummy Wallace, who brings what positivity he can and also recommends some modest adjustments (which they largely ignore).
The phrase that crops up again and again is “meitheal” – the old Irish term for the assistance of friends as neighbours. Without it, the family simply could not get the project up and running again. Everything is too expensive and Timmie has to rely on his workmates chipping in their services for free at weekends while he works all day and night (and becomes upset when he talks about not seeing enough of his kids)
Wallace is an enthusiastic narrator – but is he anything beyond that? He advises Timmie and Siobhán against putting in an upstairs bathroom. However, they ignore him and plough on. When he later visits the completed structure, it’s clear they made the right decision – Wallace gasps at the “dreamy view to the Seven Heads Peninsula”.
It is a reminder that Wallace isn’t an active participant in the makeover so much as an enthusiastic bystander. Still, that ebullience is what carries Great House Revival. Wallace is all about the positives – the beauty of west Cork and the return to the village of a generation forced away by unemployment.
Obviously there’s a darker side to Tommie and Siobhán’s do-over woes, and it is sobering to reflect on the degree to which they have had to rely on the goodwill of their community to get over the finish line. But Wallace isn’t here for the misery – for better or worse, the Great House Revival is a feel-good show determined to keep smiling through difficult times.
