BE IT EVER SO HUMBLED: If British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be remembered for one thing, it’s leading a rehabilitation of Britain’s image, transforming a land once famous for its dreariness into a cosmopolitan lightning rod.
And if I can thank the British television industry for one thing, it’s disabusing me of the illusion that this might be true.
Thanks to Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, which airs here on Food, I know that British cuisine is still a marvel of gummy, insipid, deep-fried inedibility, and thanks to How Not To Decorate, I know that huge swaths of Britain’s cities are mired in a postwar nightmare of flocked wallpaper, chintz, figurines and filth.
For the latter revelation, I can thank a couple of Scotsmen — or rather, two Scotsmen who are a couple — who host the show. Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan were in Toronto last weekend for an appearance at a home show, and to scout out our country for a future Canadian edition of How Not To Decorate. They arrived at my table in a downtown hotel tea room wearing kilts, charmed everyone in sight, and insulted my home ferociously.
“I think anywhere you go there will be elements of good style and bad style,” said Justin, the blond one.
“As far as we’re concerned, there are only two kinds of taste; good taste, which is ours, and bad taste, which is yours and everybody else’s. And we are on a constant mission of decorative beautification. We aim to improve every single house on the globe.”
The pair have gone from property speculators to tastemakers, and the new season of HNTD features a few celebrity home makeovers, drawn from Britain’s vast pool of B-listers, such as Christine Hamilton, the wife of a former Tory MP, television personality, and self-described battleaxe. Her flat gets a dramatic renovation, complicated by her insistent bullying and meddling.
“That woman knows nothing about design,” Colin tells me. “There was one section we edited out of public decency, because Christine Hamilton actually snogged Justin. She kissed Justin. She put her tongue in his mouth when he had a wee bit too much champagne and she snogged him. That woman would flirt with a dead man. She then came bounding in to me and she said, ‘I’ve kissed Justin! I kissed him. I snogged him. It was my Mrs. Robinson moment.’
“And I said, ‘Darling, it was more your Mrs. Doubtfire moment. You’re a drag queen.’ Hideous, hideous woman!”
A glutton for punishment, I take out pictures of my family’s rented apartment, which are greeted by sharp intakes of breath. The cluttered office and kitchen take a beating: “Do you know what this is?” asks Colin. “Living in Tetris. You have to squeeze in one thing, then everything has to move along to make space.”
“It’s completely stylefree,” Justin states. “Obviously you’re a creative person, and so is your wife, but you’re imprinting your life on a very bare and blank canvas … This is like a scene from a non-event.”
Our daughters’ bedroom elicits a moan from Colin. “It’s a bit depressing, isn’t it? Where’s the pictures and exciting things on the wall? Look at that bed — it’s like prison chic. It’s like a little kid’s cell.”
I make the usual protests, weaselling out one excuse after another for our lack of time, of money, and the demands of parenting. “You’re bringing up these two kids and they’re going to think this is acceptable,” Colin admonishes me. “Another generation of clutterers, and it’s all your fault.” It’s a bracing experience, and one I can recommend to any of my readers who, should they feel moved to surrender their homes, can visit the HGTV website and petition the boys to abuse their taste and stage an intervention.
In the meantime, the new season of How Not To Decorate begins tonight at 9 p.m.
