TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 22: Grand Designs (feat. Alice Caldwell-Kelly)

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

This week, Alice joins Nate and Milo to discuss the British reality TV show 'Grand Designs,' in which insane people decide to sacrifice it all to build the house of their dreams. Does it sometimes go okay? Sure. But most of the time, it's a slow-motion wreck with dyspeptic commentary from what we might describe as architecture Jeremy Clarkson. Enjoy! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to yet another edition of Britannology is a it's a rare all all remote edition. We're reliving peak lockdown here. I am Milo Edwards and I'm joined as ever by my co-host, Nate Pathay. Hello, lovely day. I've been stricken by an unknown illness that is not COVID and so I am at home today. Nate's got the vapors. You have a form of COVID that has yet to be discovered. You have the Zeta variant.

Exactly. It only manifests itself with old age fatigue and diarrhea. Nate's got boomer COVID. Speaking of old age fatigue and diarrhea, Alice Caldwell Kelly. Glad to be joined by IBS consultant as always. That's right. Happy to be here. The reason why we've got Alice.

Aside from IBS commentary is that we want to talk about I think one of the most long running and British TV series of all time. Grand Designs. This is an episode of Britannology that Alice has personally lobbied for but I'm extremely behind it because I grew up watching this show because my parents are massive interior design heads and would watch it religiously and I really cannot convey how insane the people who go on this show are. And it's a particular kind of like middle class English psychosis also because you used to get all of these sort of like house shows in a sort of block in the middle of the afternoon.

So you'd have this and you'd have like Escape to the Country which was like people moving to the middle of nowhere. Escape to the Country fucking sucks. Yeah. All kinds of shit like this. But like to me the standout was always Grand Designs which is about middle class people who have made enough money that what they want to do is to build their own home from scratch. Yeah. And I feel like a great companion show to this which we can talk about as well as Homes Under the Hammer because I feel like they kind of they occupy like two different segments of the same concept

which is like either building or renovating a house where Grand Designs is at the very top where like we have this absolutely insane idea which will cost more money than God has to realize. And then Homes Under the Hammer is like I am landlord Baz. I have bought eight council houses that are extremely derelict at auction and I'm going to make them minimally habitable and rent them out to Romanians. And what's really funny is that like all of these shows they're all on in the daytime. They're all on terrestrial TV on free view. And so the two ways you can come to these shows.

I think Grand Designs was an evening one but most of them are. They would have rerun it in the day for sure. Yeah. So but like there's two ways you can come to these shows. One is you know your parents are into them when you're growing up. The other is you are a student or you are like on benefits or something where you have a lot of free time in the day and absolutely no money. And so you have like essentially five channels.

And what's going to be on them for the most part is houses for some reason just as part of a general obsession with property. Yeah. You're on benefits. You've got no money. You're watching Grand Designs. You're thinking I wish I lived in that house and then you switch over to Homes Under the Hammer

and say I do live in that house. But it's that or countdown is the thing. Countdown probably the least cursed option. You know you might get a bit of you might get some slightly pro IDF rhetoric but otherwise you know pretty pretty ungrateful. That could be a Britonology in and of itself to be honest. So to bring the listener in on what's happened here Alice picked out a Grand Designs episode that I actually hadn't seen.

But I think she chose very well in it. I think it is kind of the text of just demonstrating how insane like the Grand Designs concept is. Alice and I watched that episode due to a design error on the All 4 website. Nate watched a completely different episode. Yeah. So we're now doing book report. Like Nate is going to explain the one that he saw

and we're going to talk him through the one that we saw which if you're at all familiar with Grand Designs you may already know it's the Lighthouse episode. Yeah. So we discovered this because at the start we were doing a bit of pre-show chat and Alice and I were just saying how crazy this episode is and like how fucking bleak it gets and all this stuff. And Nate was like I'm going to have to disagree with you.

The house was quite nice. It was only a hundred thousand pounds over budget and we're like you watched a different episode. That's what happened. There's no way you're talking about the same show. So I watched the Bunker episode and I watched the Revisited. The Albanian Grand Design. The Hoseaist episode.

No, the Bunker episode is basically about a Scottish guy named Adrian and his wife Megan and their three kids who have impossibly posh names that I've forgotten but they're ridiculous. And Adrian fell in love with concrete and brutalism probably because he grew up in Glasgow but also because he was a BMX racer as a kid. And because he's a Hoseaist. And he loves the feel of concrete.

So he wants to build a home solidly out of concrete in a brutalist style on a plot of land that they purchased in West Sussex that has an old bungalow on it that they have to have demolished and then subsequently they're going to build this. And he's gone to Switzerland with his architect to find like certain kinds of insulated concrete and load bearing concrete to kind of avoid the problems of solid concrete construction

which involves them having to make BAS contractor basically mix this weird precision concrete that's insulated and that technically speaking wouldn't require rebar but they wind up having to use rebar anyway because British builders just won't do it because they're like it's literally going to crack. So by the time the project takes forever and by the time that they're nearly complete

it seems like a money pit. They're not really living in it because it's leaking and there's problems with it. And it just looks... It seems like a very, very interesting, elegant design if you like. I mean, it's sort of like... They've decorated it sort of like upmarket, live, laugh, love, Barbican

but it's not bad and the concept's not bad. But then when they revisit it two years later it's actually quite nice. The Adrian has kind of compromised on some of his notions of like no refinement, no details, no resin sealing. It's just raw fucking concrete. And it actually winds up looking very nice. The kids like it, the kids' friends like it.

It worked out in a way that's almost kind of as charming and it was only, like I said, it was about 100,000 pounds over their planned budget which if you... It's just the one in Lewis and East Sussex. It might be, yeah. Yeah, Adrian, yeah. I'm just looking at some pictures of it.

The one we saw... It looks like Churchill College came. The one we saw did not work out this well. So, and I don't know if yours, if they would do a revisited down the road if it does wind up working out. I imagine if you'd seen the end of this one in its initial viewing you would have thought,

wow, what a fucking disaster. One of the things that makes it interesting is that Adrian's job is that he is an underwater maintenance tech for oil platforms. So he does scuba diving to maintain oil platforms in the North Sea. So the problem is in order to go make money at times when this project runs out of cash

he has to disappear to the North Sea to go underwater. He just has to fuck off for six months. And leave his wife as a project manager because he's opted to be the project manager on this project. And so she has to, you know, drop off their three kids with her parents and then go put on a hard hat

and manage this project of a solid concrete house. That's a strong Adrian. He's got a fit wife. Two classic tropes of grand designs here. One, having a weird job. Usually it's more of a sort of a nonsense job. Like essentially. Such as the guy in the lighthouse.

Yeah, exactly. Because the way that a grand designs episode usually starts is we meet the couple who are going to build the house. And it's always like, you know, Andrew and Ginny, you know, Ginny is like a poster frame restorer. And Andrew was like, I don't know,

he works selling like widgets. Their budget is 15 trillion pounds. And they're going to go over it. So in the case of the bunker, they paid 500,000 pounds for the bungalow, knocked it down, and the budget was originally supposed to be 400,000 pounds for the home.

It wound up costing them about 500,000 to complete it. But in the end, they actually seemed quite happy with it. And Adrian seems humbled at the end. Basically he said there's some accent details he's thought about adding like a front wall and stuff. But he says, I can't even bring myself to book someone to come and mix concrete anymore.

Like I've kind of gotten my fill of concrete. He's done a version therapy with concrete. They made him smoke a whole pack of concrete and now he doesn't want any more. But the thing that I noticed about it was because of... Did you make a toaster ever felt like this? I had to leave my wife in charge of the bunk. I came away from it probably more sympathetic

towards the couple and less sympathetic towards the show because they kept... Because of the fact that brutalism is associated with a kind of utopian housing policy in the UK and generally throughout Western Europe. They kept basically just being incredibly condescending to this guy. And it's just sort of like,

well, I mean, all right, she's not working out as planned from the jump, but you can't act like this guy is just going into it like it's some sort of weird folly. Like he's clearly done his fucking homework. He managed to negotiate a licensing deal with a Swiss company to test out their specialty concrete and stuff. What you've done there is you've seen the only episode

of Grand Designs that was not predicated on folly. Oh, yes. Well, that's the thing because it was revisited. If you had watched it at the end of the original, it would have seemed very, very bleak because the house wasn't being lived in. Half of it was incomplete. The roof was leaking.

It didn't have... I don't think it had power on yet. And it just looked like they had sunk a lot of money into a thing that wound up looking like... The best thing I could describe it as is it looks like the fake villages they'd made us practice like fucking urban warfare in when he was in the army. It looks like they paid 400,000 pounds

to live in a close quarters battle training ground. Going to have to kill some insurgents who are all in the cuckoo clock restoration business. They live in solid concrete houses. Also, the other thing in Grand Designs, the other recurring theme that you've identified here is what the wife in that couple is doing, which is usually being the longest-suffering woman in the world.

Yeah, you do sometimes you get a red Grand Designs where it's a couple of really in it together, but almost all of the time, it's a guy who is about to get divorced. And you're just slowly watching it happen in real time. Half of the point of this show, I feel, is essentially distillable down to adding a big divorce on the side of the screen

and you kind of watch it go up and up and up. This is essentially a feeder show for Judge Judy. Also, the other thing is they always get pregnant at some point. This doesn't happen in either of the ones we saw, but usually, because I've seen a lot of Grand Designs, I'm slightly obsessed. And one of the most common things to happen in Grand Designs is they get like six months into building a house.

It's like a sort of concrete, furabunker-looking shell that living in like a static caravan on the building site. And then the wife gets pregnant and it's just like it becomes a whole extra layer of stress because now they have to have a house within nine months. And it's just, I think it's delightful that we can... It's an experiment in watching human hubris, which I'm a big fan of.

I love seeing a PR consultant warming up some baby formula milk on a tranjeer in a cagoule. Yes. It is pure Shard and Freud. It is very funny too because in the episode that I watched, when you first meet the couple and the family, like their kids are quite young, their kids look like they're probably, you know,

nine, six and three or four. And then by the end of it, because it takes so long, by the time that you get to the final revisited version, like the older kids are basically tweens, I think one of those, he's the sound of his voice makes you think he's probably about 12 or 13. And he says, like his friends like the house,

but when he first started going to his new school, they're like, oh, you're the kid who loosened the nuclear silo. And he said his nickname was Nuke Boy for a while. And I was just like, oh, I love England so much. You have to recite British school. A fucking sane country. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Chernobyl boy. Well, allow Alice and I to raise you, the fucking, the two daughters in the lighthouse episode, who start off aged about like eight and 10 and end up just fully like my age. Oh, fuck yeah. But by the end of the episode, they talked to one of them who is like already like

graduated from uni. Yeah. It's really, it's a strange, it's a strange thing as like as slowly my, my approach to the eldest daughter went from, that's a child too. Hello. Brief moment like, fuck, am I not?

Wait, no, she's just like my age. Like that's fine. She has aged. Like I was also a child once. That's fine. So are we going to, are we going to open a new volume called Britnology to the lighthouse? Yeah.

So let's hear about this shit. Well, we meet, we meet the couple and the couple are sort of sort of frosted tips, soul patch, wide care, Stammer. Oh fuck. This guy is so incredible.

He's like, what was the guy's, is it Nick? Is that his name? Oh God. It was Nick. There's something like this. Yeah. He works in the music business, man. And they're like showing you all of his like gold records

or whatever. He's like a record producer. And then they're showing you that he's made a load of, and this is where it gets very Nathan Barley. Like lots of his money was made from a series of dance compilation CDs he reproduced in the nineties that are called like equilibrium or something. Euphoria.

Euphoria, fuck. Yeah. And apparently he's still getting substantial royalties off of these when we start the show and like, I think it might even be like 2012 when they start filming. Yeah. I think it's even earlier. I think it's like 2006.

I think 2012 is like the first revisit. Yeah. And so he's, he's married. His wife is very long suffering. His wife's name Hazel. She, she's like one of these jobs that doesn't sound real. She's like a product buyer or something. She's like, yeah.

That's cool being a woman. Aren't we all? They be shopping. And their official job is that I be shopping. And they're two daughters and they're going to, they've moved from London to North Devon where they bought a 1950s house that looks a bit shit and a bit windswept on a, on a cliff,

like fully on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Yeah. This is very like, you know, they're going to spend 20 years finishing a house, which will then be destroyed by climate change. It's like, it's a powerful energy. Yes. And also they've done this weird thing because they're like

these weird enclaves in Britain, like tiny little slivers of land miles from London that have London prices for some reason. And this bit of Devon is one of them. So they've paid like, I don't know, fucking a million quid for this shit 1950s house on a cliff. Yeah. I, I'm looking at pictures of it from an article from Devon Live.

And genuinely my take is this website. Friend of the show. Yeah. The building basically looks like, you know, it basically looks like the place where you buy coffee in a Tarkovsky movie. Like it just, there's something very, very strange about it that it doesn't,

it doesn't even really remind me of any kind of modern architecture so much is that it just looks. It's because the guy had a plan and the plan was he wanted to like move his entire family out of London into an Ikea painting, you know, like the sea in it. And to build a lighthouse, he was going to have the original, their fifties house demolished.

And then on this peninsula, which is like already visibly eroding, he's going to build like a four story round lighthouse style house with like accommodation and like a level beneath it. It's going to have an infinity pool and it's also going to have a big room at the top that's going to be entirely glazed called the storm room. Yeah.

He's Sebastian Gorka. I mean, essentially the guy wants to fuck the weather. Right. That's the vibe you get from this guy. Yeah. He really, he wants to get sucked off by a storm. Keer stormer. No, that's something else.

But like what happens is like we do this render which always puts me in mind of the like the way news agencies reported the killing of Osama bin Laden. We've got a special crawl space in the bottom of the house. Saddam Hussein. Yeah. Approach is guarded by tribal militiamen where we do a sort of like virtual walkthrough

where they show us the like the different rooms at the house and what it's hoped to look like. And I think this is purely designed so that you can hate them more. Like I think by the point where they're like, oh, and he's going to have an infinity pool next to the ocean is where you're just supposed to be like. Yeah. There's some photos of what it looks like at present from 2021.

So from this year. And I follow an account on Instagram called socialist modernism that's constantly going around like Bulgaria and taking pictures of decaying buildings. And they look like they're in better shape than this. Let's be perfectly honest. This is after years and years because the plan is they're going to they're going to build this.

This they're going to demolish their fifties house, move into like rented accommodation and then have this have this lighthouse built within 18 months or something for 1.2 million pounds. Total. That's that. That's their budget and everything in this is bespoke. Like obviously all the walls are fucking curved because it's a lighthouse. And it's going to be like that.

They're absolute dream home. It's going to be future proof. They're going to build their own access roads. And it's all going to have to be anchored into the bedrock of this peninsula because everything else is just going to a road. Yeah. It's because there's like sandstone and then bedrock. So the sandstone is going to go.

And so they have to drive these like 25 foot long 25 meter long piles down to the bedrock in order to support this house. Yeah. Basically the whole thing is very unambitious and it's all going to be fine. Yes. And so this starts going wrong pretty quickly. They like they demolished their house. He crosses the Rubicon by making his family watch their house be demolished,

which is very funny. And this happens right as the financial crisis happens. Yeah. At this point, the sort of the like years and years to spooky choral music started happening in my head because like then the populace, the populace took it away because essentially one of the things about this guy is that like he has the world's best credit racing for no apparent reason. And he obviously has a shitload of money, but like not still not enough.

Like I don't know what for like whatever this guy clearly like was a music mogul in the fucking nineties and made loads of money. He signed Johannes vonk. Yeah. But spent over half of it on cocaine allegedly. We cannot. Well, we cannot legally say that he spent over half of it on cocaine, but he has the vibe of someone who spent over half of it on cocaine

and is now over half of it on frosting his hair tips. Yeah. You know what the weirdest thing about the frosted tips is that he has those in the last bit. He doesn't have them in 2006 when it would have been acceptable. He has them in like 2017. And he really does also look like a wide Kier Starmer in the face. It's like it's like Kier Starmer meets Guy Fieri. Yeah.

Yeah. Very strange looking man. Yeah. Okay. So the guy's name is Edward. I've just discovered. Okay. But anyway, the populace take it away because there's a recession.

You may have heard of this in 2008. Have you heard of the for a house built in North Devon on a rock? Are they having a lot of trouble with the collapse of Northern Rock? God damn it. I was just channeling Hussain for a second there. And what's really funny is at every turn, and this is why I think it's the best Grand Designs episode because it's like a synecdoche for the whole thing, right, is at every turn, at Kevin MacLeod, the presenter will come back every like couple of years.

And every couple of years, the financial crisis is once again worsened. And this guy will say something to him like, yeah, no, I'm in a lot more debt now, but I have to keep taking on more debt in order to finish it and in order to pay off the original debt. So I have to keep spending money on this ridiculous lighthouse project. Basically, you've built the Winchester mansion in Fortnite and you have to keep spending money on it. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. And so the cost of this balloons. And it's like my dream of living in an F 35. More or less every couple of years, he comes back. He's another million pounds in debt. Who keeps lending this man money? Well, this is the really interesting part is like after the financial crisis stops

work, he goes to a non-traditional lender, which I thought initially meant Dave Courtney. Wonga.com. What he does. And I don't know how the fuck he manages this. He borrows half a million quid from a hedge fund to get started, to build like his own house. I think this is just, that's just like mate's network stuff, honestly, because like, you don't really borrow money from hedge funds unless like, you know, the people who run them

because they can be fast and loose with their money as much as they want to. It doesn't really matter, but that seems more like a less of an investment and more like, you know, white Reginald, the guy who owns his hedge fund and he lends you money. Reginald capital to Mr. and Mrs. Capital. But he develops a plan. And again, this is just like magnificent. It's such a good metaphor, which is that in order to pay off the debt on building this expensive, ridiculous house, he's going to build another second expensive, ridiculous

house. But slightly less expensive and ridiculous on the same site. Yeah. The kind of house where if he'd have set his sights on this still quite expensive and ridiculous house to begin with, he would have been fine. Yes. He also calls it to the eye. I presume as in like the eye of the storm because he wants to be a Bond villain.

Yeah. And also fuck the weather. But it's the eye actually, because this denonce plus. Welcome to I emoji house. Yeah, that's right. My friend, my friend Jeffrey is coming for a visit. And like the eye is sort of this like modernist bunker house, a bit like the one you saw. But it still has to be driven into the bedrock because it's almost literally being built

on sand. And so it just keeps absorbing money and every time that they come back to them, it's very, very funny because the like his wife is like visibly more tense and like visibly detesting him more. Yeah. There's one point where she says, if I thought at any point about how much money we have borrowed, I would never sleep. Do you want to save the big reveal about their marriage for the end or we can cut this?

No, it's they fully get divorced. I mean, I think that was that was coming pretty, pretty early. Yeah. I expected because in the episode I watch, I was like, is she really on board with this? But in the end, they seem pretty decently happy as opposed to yes. When I read this, I'm like, oh, yes, they're divorced. That makes sense. Yes.

Yeah. No, there's there's a bit where the presenter asks them about the about the house and he says like, oh, it's like a because the guy says it. It was it was like my childhood dream to live in a lighthouse. And he says, oh, like a little, a little boys, you know, a little boys dream, little girls also turning to the wife and she says, oh, I'm more like a nightmare. And like cringed. I just, I just, it was like I had been hit in the solar plexus.

They just went. If you pull, if you pull us here, you can hear the divorce happening in real time. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially. Yeah. Kevin is envisaging a courtroom and she's rotating it in her mind. It's so it's so funny that the towards the end of the episode when Kevin McLeod goes

back there for the last time in like 2019 and is talking to the guy and he's like, oh, what happened to your wife? And he's like, we, we part of a company about a year ago. And they play the like sad music over him, which is like, feels like sort of adding insult to injury. Yeah. And then he's like, yeah, I ruined that woman's life. He's just like, okay.

But also, also by this point, his daughters are girl bosses. And so that they interview one of his daughters who was like back from back from uni and they're like, well, what do you, what do you think should, you should do? And she's like, well, I think he should finish, finish the house. And it's like, I love King Lear. I love watching this guy on a fucking like windswept peninsula get absolutely driven to ruin by his daughters. Yeah.

I love that. Like they're like, yeah, our mom's a pussy. Dad should finish this fucking house. She couldn't handle it. Fuck that bitch. Finish the lighthouse. Ships have to be kept away from the rocks, Kevin. But the other thing is right, like it as a sort of a spoiler, I guess, by the end of

this episode, despite having spent, you know, almost a decade on it, the house is still unfinished. And he spent like four million quid. Yes. He spent four million quid and what he's created is a kind of like Maunceau sea fort. It doesn't even have like the cladding on the exterior by the time we finish it just is this perfect concrete cylinder with windows in it. And he just says off-handedly, you're not really popular with some of the locals.

I think it's a bit of an eyesore. And then you look to this town across the bay, which has had its sole sea view perfectly ruined by this one concrete lighthouse directly in the middle of it. Yeah. But also fuck those guys. It's a literal alien versus predator situation between British nimbies and like rich music producer building the world's stupidest house. Years ago, I was driving when I lived in Alaska to see a friend who lived in Fairbanks.

And it's a weird drive because on the map, it doesn't seem that far and it's like maybe an hour and a half flight. But if you drive it, it's easily eight hours. And you go through some parts of Alaska where land obviously is cheap, but it's decently close enough to civilization that if you do like one long trip on a weekend once a month, you can resupply yourself. So it's not like living off-grid. And I've seen some of the strangest homes.

I think I've ever seen in my life in some of these places. Obviously, you have your cursed A-frames. You have your shipping container homes. But what I one time saw was what effectively looked like if a geodesic dome had tumors and also wasn't made out of glass, but rather was made out of some kind of ceramic material. And having watched just this one episode and hearing the second one. Like China House. Recounted to me.

I have this impression that this is just sort of like a recurring, like a Joseph Campbell recurring theme throughout like the history of dudes. But a guy just gets this ambition to build the most fucked house you can possibly imagine. And it's something that arrived to him in childhood like this critically cannot occur to you as an adult. It has to have arrived to you at some point like in childhood or like early adolescence. But you are going to, you are going to live in the fucked house of your dreams. And if you have the resources disposable to you, then you're just going to pursue that,

you know, damn the torpedoes. And I would make fun of it and say this is like a British guy phenomenon. But surely it's not like anywhere you go that's remote, but close enough that you can live without living like a nomad. You will see these fucked houses that someone that was the dream and the dream has been realized. But there's never been a moment's reflection of like perhaps the dream was not a good one. Me and my wife are going to live in the Logan's Run dome. This is always the way with grand designs and you're totally right. There's just an idea a guy has like to build.

I want to live in like a Celtic roundhouse or I want to live in like a grass walled bunker. It's like every single one of these things. A lot of these people, you're not even like you don't understand the principles of architecture, but like you haven't even read the three little pigs. Like the ideas that people come up with are just like, dude, no, just I'm like a dumb guy. But like this is obviously a bad idea. I mean, I remember seeing those that whatever revolutionary group that was that says that they were they'd like taken over some land and they were going to build like a compound out in the middle of nowhere and like black hammer out in like a really high desert part of the black hammer.

New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, somewhere along those lines. I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, yeah, I took a hike when I was 11 in New Mexico and thought like it would be so fucking cool to live on this mountain. But I never there was never a point in my adult life and I was like, no, I must return with a V. I must recapture that moment and live on a mountain in the middle of fucking nowhere. Like there's this movie called Into the Wild that's kind of about this and it doesn't really go well. So, you know, it's like as you said. Christopher has exceeded his budget on this bus in rural Alaska. Like you said by like there's this extent to it is like not only have you not consulted with sent, you know, a sort of sensible approach to architecture,

but you haven't read the three little pigs like there's just no groundwork done here. Absolutely. The best part is when they get mad at their own architects or they get mad at their own workmen. And occasionally the most quietly subversive part is when they will interview, you know, the glazer who is putting together their custom fabricated argon filled glass. It was just like, well, I guess I better not drop it then. I also really enjoyed the repeated appearances of Crane Baz. Yes.

For a number of years who just keeps moaning about how stupid that was. Crane Baz has two teeth visible and like there's a great bit where the guy comes up to him in like, what is fully like a decent gale? Like it's sea state bad off the coast. And he's just like, why is the work stopped? And Crane Baz has to explain to him, well, you're trying to get me to lift a bunch of like architectural steel on a crane in a storm. And if the wind, it's going to blow the thing and I'm not, it's going to hit the house. Just incredible.

Yeah. And then, and then Edward just has to like nod and be like, ah, yes, I see. I guess you have kind of a quitter attitude, but like I do take your point. Yeah. Just like watching these sort of like middle, upper middle to upper class, like sort of passive, familiar skies get like destroyed by hubris is that's the appeal of the show to me. I can imagine him just saying Ben Verho should have to deal with this. I'm trying to get some Chinese workmen in who won't be afraid of the wind.

I need some people who are truly desperate to work on this project. The CIA keeps fucking air dropping plasterers, but I always catch them in the night before they can show up on the work site. I'm just thinking about other grand designs episodes and like the other one that comes to mind is a guy in London who is like a obviously very posh because a former like Scott's guards officer. Oh, yeah. Anyone, anyone who was an officer in the guards, just light speed posh. Yes. Like that is a real, like I know a couple of like normalish guys who when they, when they were doing like the Sandhurst interviewing at Regiments thing,

interviewed at like the household cavalry, I think, and they were like, I, and these are guys who went to Cambridge but are just kind of normal. And they were like, fuck those guys were posh. They were like, I just couldn't do it. They were like, literally, they said they were sat outside the interview and one of the, and one of the captains walked through and chatted to one of the other interviewees and was like, Hugo, Hugo, how are you doing? Oh, I was in Afghan with your brother and how is the rugger at Exeter? And he was like, I'm leaving. I'm going to another fucking regiment.

This guy bought a like a graveyard gatehouse in central London and tried to successfully, in fact, renovated, renovated a lot of it, like underground, but a large part of his like dispute was with, I think it was like Haringate Council, what if I'm like Brent Council, where he wanted private access to the graveyard after hours for unexplained reasons. Yeah. Cause he's like renovating like a public toilet in a graveyard to turn into a house. It just sounds like the most powerful Baz thing. Just like, love me graveyard, love me toilet. I don't like it as a crematorium. Imagine being the council planning officer who gets like, you know, the application from, you know, major Reginald, Syngen, Smythe retired.

Like, yeah, can I put a private gate into this graveyard so I can just walk around? Well, that's the thing too, is that you imagine your normal day of getting planning applications from 18 different guys named Gaza, and you want to add like a third story to their by-to-let property that they found someone who's willing to do it for 10,000 pounds. And then all of a sudden onto your desk comes this application for like, I'm going to live in a toilet and I need to have private seance access to some graves. It's so incredible cause he's basically like fucking Danger Mouse or some shit. Like, what if Danger Mouse had been to like Fettys College? Like, I want to live in a subterranean lair under a fucking toilet in a graveyard. What's also really funny is the way-

That's an origin story, but his parents were killed by toilets. The way planning authorities are shown in grand designs, it's always like, because like we follow the people building them, it's always like, oh, the tyrants at the local council have refused to grant permission for me to build a series of anti-tank bunkers across this nature reserve. And then a couple of them, they just go ahead anyway, just without planning. And like, are then surprised when the council are like, no, you actually do have to like take this back down again. Yeah, never, never get into a dispute with the fucking council. It is interesting to me that this is something that I've learned from my own sort of digging with regard to like, what is possible to construct with or without permission. Because, you know, I live, if the London property market did actually collapse, I would probably be okay with buying the house that I live in now,

but there's no way in hell that I'm going to pay, you know, what it's valued at, because it's obscene. And we've talked about this before, but I did find- You need to sell a patch for that. Yeah, exactly. I did find it very funny to learn that, for example, loft conversions and things of those natures, legitimately adding an additional story to your home does not require planning permission from the council so long as it does not fundamentally alter the front facade of your house. So effectively like- Yeah, and it doesn't change the exterior pretty much, you can do whatever.

Yeah, you can basically do it, but it did make me laugh because there's the generous and the not-so-generous interpretation. The generous interpretation is like, okay, yeah, well, you know, if you're gonna, because there's not too far from me, there's a guy who's painted his house like a ska kid's tennis shoes. Like it's purple with black checkerboards all over. I'm not joking. Obviously doing something like that, like you can imagine, might cause some frustration with your neighbors. But the not-so-generous interpretation is basically like, as long as your house still looks just as much like shit as all the other houses around it, we don't care how nice you make it in back. And that to me is sort of like the planning permission brain, I suppose. But then also you do see when people, you know, make like Tower of Kefka level fucking alterations to their home to add more rental rooms.

So I do kind of understand the, you know, the drive. That's also very British. It's just taking a shit house and just turning it into a mansion for like no reason when you could have just gone and bought a nicer house. Like there were, when I was at school in Essex, there were some very, very wealthy people at my school, but who were like the most like Baz guys you can imagine. Like they all had like Dave Courtney money. Like no one was quite sure how they'd made their money, but it was all like dodgy as fuck. And there was this one family who they had bought a detached house in Harlow that was like a pebble dash. Like it was probably like a four bedroom house. It was like a decent size and they had turned it into West Fork from Dallas.

Like they had built a fucking Greek colonnade in front of this pebble dash house. I got an indoor swimming pool. It was absolutely deranged. I had a friend like that in middle school that we went to his house and I actually got in trouble for some of the rude things that I had said because I didn't realize his mom was spying on us because they had multiple stairwells to access the room that like that was like the playroom or sort of like then that they had because they had bought an old farmhouse and that Winchester mentioned it. So it just had like wings upon wings upon wings of like interlocking additions and things along those lines. And if I remember correctly, like it was his mom, his dad, his brother, his sister and him. So there was five people in a house that was probably a farmhouse that was probably built to be something along the lines of like 1200 to 1600 square feet.

And they had made it into like a 5000 square foot house. Like and so that that tendency definitely exists. But I guess the thing for me that's so hilarious about it in Britain is that often times it's being done in row houses or like detached homes that are might as well be row houses. Like they're they're very narrowly to the land. There's no land. There's no space apart from for some reason the massive plots that these guys. Yeah. Being being a product buyer or whatever is enough to enable you to get this, you know, this like it's been very good year in the B shop in business.

Exactly. Yeah. And I guess that also could be, you know, indicative of the fact that these always seem to be built. You said there have been episodes of it where they're outside London, but this this often times or they're inside London rather. But this seems to be outside London. And to me, at least I do find it funny. It's often in the middle of fucking nowhere. You know, you have decided to, you know, to basically create the fucking Sandra Pompey do like in just in the middle of Wiltshire or something like that.

Yeah. Just like, yeah, yeah. All right. Okay. Everything around here looks like a thatch cottage. I'm going to build what looks like the most haunted McDonald's play area. And it's my dream home. His four story Ronald McDonald's statue is under question due to budgetary concerns.

Well, there's a really funny bit in the middle of the lighthouse episode where the girls get off the bus from school just effectively on this fucking windswept coastal road. Like, I can't believe the school bus even stops there. And then they just stood on the corner of this road watching their only house get demolished. It's like a day at school girls. Yeah. We're just destroying our house. One of the one of them is like, I used to really like when my bedroom was just heartbreaking. You just watch it being destroyed.

Oh my God. There's one point quite early in the episode. I'm sure you remember where the girls say they've been doing a car boot sale to raise money for the house. Oh my God. Yeah. And you're just like, oh, oh, hun. And this is before they've really like broken ground. Like all they've done at this point is like demolish a perfectly good house.

But like, they haven't invested the like millions of pounds into this yet. And they're just like, they're already trying to like fucking crowdfund for their dad's weird passion project. It's like, yeah. It's also very strange to me to see the sort of like the aneurysms beginning to happen is when they're having to build the driveway. Because the driveway has to be like a bridge because there's no solid ground for it to be built on. And it costs a hundred thousand pounds to build like a 50 foot driveway. And then and then you have like the the the architect who's like who's like Lord fancy. Yeah.

Who's saying it's wonderful. This piece of architecture you see and he's like and he's like gesturing along like the wall of the lighthouse that's been built. And he's like, look at that double curve there. It's majestic. Building curves out of block work is of course tremendously difficult. You have to cut and taper the blocks and so on. But the the play of light on a curve is just magical. They do love talking about the play of lights.

Did you have a Bond villain? I just keep flashing back to the that video I found on YouTube of Jeremy Irons consulted on his opinion of the gherkin. And he's just like, I love the gherkin because I love curves. And it's just like there's no way to say that without sending like you said either a Bond villain a pervert or some combination thereof. Yeah, the giant butt plug building. Hey, man, I think the gherkin is cool personally. But I mean, you know, maybe that's just because there was something very unique about it at the time now. Now central London skyscrapers are so massive and ugly that like now they all look like that.

Yeah. My favorite one is still the walkie talkie that melts cars. I like this shard because it's so unironically like an anime villain layer that you just sort of have to accept. There's just like this dagger shaped affront to God that you see everywhere in London. Like it's the one building you'll see basically everywhere. So, you know, like in the grand scheme of things, maybe this was just a decade of sort of Icarus flying close to the sun when it came to architecture. Final fantasy villains layer where Essex guys can go out for a nice dinner on a Friday night. And we're sure we'll someday have its studios on the very top was just right at the top emanating fucking power studio.

Yeah, you have that. You have the personal of this guy building his lighthouse or whatever. And then you have the professional, which is the shot in either case, just sort of like terrible, terrible projects designed by people who look at curves and go swoosh. Yeah. If your architect at any point makes a swooshing noise, you should very much not do that. Yeah, exactly. You should not be in business with that person. No, definitely not.

Like this is this is a guy who like this. I love the architect in this because he's just like jacking himself off constantly about this design, which is destroying this guy's family. Because he has no skin in the game whatsoever. He just drew this thing and these people are stupid enough to try and build it. And so like he's they're like building his little vision and he is like he has like no, no fucking risk exposure to this whatsoever. I don't see why it's so challenging. It looked perfectly normal when I designed it in doom. Minecraft architect.

Sarah Dittman's husband designed this out. Why are all the toilets already clogged? But then then the really tragic bit is like right at the end after we've had the divorce part, they then start talking about how now he has two possible scenarios as a way out of this project. Scenario one is he they're able to like keep the shitty or like the less insane and expensive house that they built and sell the really insane and expensive one if they can finish it. Which is like that's the best case scenario. There's no way they can afford to live in the insane and expensive one. They've now spent too much money. They can't afford the mortgage.

Like they have to sell it. But then the other option is they can't afford to live in either house and he has to declare bankruptcy. Well, the worst part is if you Google this, it's called Chessel Cliff House. He's still building it. No fucking way. I thought it was done. It's like the guy in South Central Los Angeles or in Compton who basically built like a gaudy cathedral on the plot of a bungalow house. I mean, some people, it's their life's work.

I hope he gets to live in it someday. But yikes. Yeah. I mean, this guy's not going to get to live in this house. No. So I have to ask, there's an extent to which this reminds me of in some capacity, this show reminds me of your standard sort of architecture redecorating show. You know, you're sort of trading spaces to some extent, you know, queer eye for the straight guy. Like there's an extent to which it's basically the show is entertaining because of the wild folly of the person driving the idea.

And the sort of straight man is the domestic partner or the roommate or somebody, whomever the family having to sort of react to these deranged flights of fancy being very difficult, you know, very, very painfully brought into this world. And to me, I don't know if you both are somewhat familiar with American television, I know. To me, like, I guess the thing that made this feel a little bit different was that in the U.S., I can't recall any shows like this being a sort of like Jeremy Clarkson adjacent where you have this sort of like, you know, kind of slightly comic personality host sort of being like, oh, yeah, is this making you divorce each other? Like, do you hate each other now? Yeah. Wow. This is such a wild idea. This is really fucking stupid.

Like, there's an extent to which the, I mean, in, I think it was trading spaces, the thing where the woman basically like decorated somebody's basement den with like fucking straw everywhere, like glued straw to the walls. And it was just like, it was like a country western theme or some shit. And it looked like god-awful garbage. Like, there's an extent to which the hosts played it straight the whole time. And so like the comic reveal was you, the viewer, just recoiling in horror at the same time as the victims. But here it felt like a lot of this is way more knowing. I think that may just be, I think that may just be Kevin McLeod. I think that may just be the host himself, his own like style.

And like, I think he's a big part of the reason why the show is so compelling is because you do get these shots of him being like, oh, well, have you know, have you actually come in under budget and then just cuts to this couple and just like. It's very like curb your enthusiasm music. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm inclined to agree. I think Kevin McLeod is my favorite part about grand designs. You've got a guy who's like a qualified architect who just sits there and sort of dial away is like, yes, well, you've built a house, but how much has it cost you financially and emotionally? Yeah, there's a point in the Lighthouse episode where the guy is in his like, I'm about to get divorced or ever. He's standing in like the skeleton of his storm room at the top and he's like, can you imagine what it will be like to stand here when there's a storm going on and fuck the weather?

Then Kevin McLeod goes, I hope I live long enough. You're just like, yes, Jenny is an ass. Because I think this is an element of, perhaps you have to be British to understand this, but there's this kind of like, it's like Kevin McLeod just taking like rich arseholes down a peg or two. Yeah. And I respect it. It is purely Schadenfreude, absolutely. Because then you get the opposite. If we have to have like, you know, a property that's like the only people who can own their homes are guys who want to like build a house to fuck the weather in, then the least we can do is like allow them in their hubris to invite this guy in so we can laugh at them.

Oh, absolutely. And I would also say too that there's a couple of dimensions here that makes it very, very funny that on one hand, the design is horrific. Like it's just not appealing. So this being like such an albatross around their necks, like this quest to design this huge piece of shit and make it actually a real thing, that's funny in its own right. I would also say that even if the design weren't as hideous, the idea of building your own home operating on the same time scale as like a My Bloody Valentine album coming out is also really funny. And so when you combine those two that, you know, you have this decades long wait, you know, it's sort of like, it's like Crossrail times a thousand for a house that sucks. It's that fundamentally in its conception sucks and is tacky and has no taste. And it's just genuinely, genuinely weird.

Like the combination of those two is very, very funny. It's also sad because there's a human cost, but like it was a preventable human cost. You know, it wasn't like lightning struck and forced this, you know, this guy into bankruptcy. There was just there are a million discrete decisions made to bring him to this point. And like, see all of the off ramps and at every turn he like swerves another lane over. Well, and also at the end of the day, I mean, it now looks like Knight Franka trying to sell this house for like 10 million quits. So he's probably going to be like five million in the clear at the end of this if he manages to sell it. If someone buys it, but who's going to buy it?

Oh, some rich asshole, some Russian oligarch. Like, come on, Nate, don't play dumb with me. Like someone will buy that fucking house. Someone that you're going to hate. Yeah. Someone. Fair. Yeah.

Someone will be dumb enough. Yeah. I mean, and this I think is where it sort of ties in with it's, with it's, you know, it's, it's yang show homes under the hammer where you have a Martin Watts's face who's just like the world's stupidest man who hosts that show. And it's just doing like the most incredible softball interviews with like the most evil landlords you've ever met in your life. And so like you've got Kevin McLeod, who is fucking taking the rich to task. And then you've got this guy who's like, you know, you've met some guy who clearly owns like 50 houses who just bought one at auction for like 50 grand and fucking hull. And he's like, I'm going to spend the absolute minimum on this. I'm going to make it barely liveable.

And then I'm going to make 10 Romanians live in it. And he's like, great. I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like when it's done. British prophecy of two wolves. And I think that that's actually a really good point overall, though, is that perhaps one of the reasons why a show like this has an appeal, not just for like the architecture heads, but for regular people to just laugh at hubris and witness hubris being punished is that this is so out of the ordinary for how the average person in Britain lives. That the fact that given this kind of budget, they are often choosing, you know, these, I mean, I keep coming back to, you know, the rhyme of the ancient Mariner, the fucking albatross. Like this is these these albatrosses of homes, I guess in a way, because it's sort of like a negative escapism, if you will.

Because most people, unless they're inheriting a home or they got lucky or they live in, you know, they happen to have a good paying job in an incredibly inexpensive part of the country. If you're under 45 owning a home, there are significant structural hurdles to it in this country. Like it is basically the only asset that is still appreciating that still and that still not only retains value, but grows in value in, you know, a country that's seen the worst wage growth in Europe since 2008, except, you know, with the exception of Greece, obviously, a country where the housing housing prices have doubled over the past 15 years everywhere in the country. But in London, they've increased like four fold, you know, in real terms, people's wages are worth less than they were in 2008. And so you have this situation where most people are renting, most people are house sharing, even into the age where their parents already own homes. And the government's solution to this is to subsidize schemes for things like help to buy, which is a huge stop to developers. We've talked about to build substandard housing.

We've talked about this on the show or joint ownership where... I love to live in the Combenold fucking megastructure. Or you don't own the full deed to your home because an institutional investor owns the other half and you basically have to pay them rent as well as pay your own mortgage. And that's a solution that's that's posited as a solution is like get people on the on the property ladder by selling them half investment vehicles for homes that are built to the same quality standards as help to buy homes. So you have this huge conundrum with with just substandard housing. I mean, I could go on that like if you look at stuff, you know, along the lines of the average size of houses, some of the smallest in Europe, the insulation or energy efficiency of these houses, the worst in Europe. Like most people in Britain live in what would be considered lower than average quality housing. And it gets way, way worse at the extremes when you start to look at, you know, places like Croydon Council or Barnett Council, the way that they mismanage things.

Places like parts of Cornwall where like they put people who are on council lists for housing for emergency housing, literally in vinyl tents in fucking like camping parks. Like you have a really acute problem and then you've got a guy who's just like, I'm going to fuck the concept of weather itself, but I have to build a five story altar on a cliff to do that. Those are the only two kinds of housing you can build. You can either build barret homes or you can build the weather fucking house. Yeah, you're either wearing like a shambling woolen tunic and living in a Waterland dorm hut, trying to subsist off of your herd of goats or your eye of the storm record producer like tripping balls on 2CB while you fuck the weather in your storm tower. Those are the two kinds of guy you can be in Britain, apparently. And this goes back to something that we've said about Britain a lot, which is that like the fundamental character of the British people is not that they want to be the guy in the storm tower fucking the weather. They want the guy in the storm tower fucking the weather to have a bad time.

They want him to be as miserable as they are. Exactly. You don't want your life to be any better. You want everyone else's lives to be as bad. Yeah, I mean, it is weird how that would get passed off as snobbery. People would say that we're being just shitheads about it. But I feel as though there's so much evidence in how these things play out, both in sort of popular culture and in politics and just in your sort of take any random vox pop on the subject. It feels like that's a conclusion you can't avoid.

That genuinely, like you said, it's either eating fucking pea soup for like the fifth time in your waddle and dob hut or, you know, you've effectively built the hanging garden in a place where it rains 300 days out of the year. And I mean, sick, you know, fucking rules. But I appreciate you introducing me to this because weirdly, like some British, some British reality TV is so surreal in its desire to sort of find the weirdest people and put them in a jar and shake it up like their bees. I can't even really understand the appeal, but shows like this, like I genuinely, if I were watching TV and this were on, I would watch it to see folly punished and hubris brought low. And you realize, like, that's all it is. That's really all it is. This is just like Euripides all over again. You should you should introduce Cynthia to this because I think she would enjoy the insanity of it. Yeah, probably will.

I mean, she she definitely was a fan of the bad episodes of trading places because she was a trading spaces because she she just she enjoys seeing hubris brought low and she has a much higher tolerance for cringe and secondhand embarrassment than I do. So maybe the reason why I enjoyed the episode I saw was that Adrian was like a fundamentally nice guy. And he seemed like he had a shit together and he loved his wife and he loved his kids and like he just was drunk. Love me. He's trying to be, you know, as professional about as he could as like, you know, meticulous as he could in his pursuit of this very, very non standard, but fundamentally still very humane home. And like I said, it was kind of the live laugh love Barbican. I did find it very, very funny, though, at the end, because Kevin McLeod is showing the camera around and showing some of the decoration choices they've made. And, you know, the ways you kind of make you try to like create warmth in a space that is fundamentally everything is concrete.

And I got the impression that his wife picked some of the artwork, maybe the majority of the artwork, who knows, in order to decorate it. And one of the art installations she had was a, and I'm not joking, a glowing pink neon sculpture of a noose. Like a noose to hang yourself with. And there's like literally on the stairwell. It's a big glowing neon noose. In the house. In grand designs that is Chekov's fucking noose. I saw an X3.

Someone's going to use it. You can't hang yourself with it, but it's just I found it very, very funny. Like that's the image you picked. That's the icon. It's great because you get this sort of window into this kind of like, oh, this is people's idea of interior design. And my favorite of these was another episode where a very badass guy, essentially like one of your one of your Harlow guys with a colonnade, except he didn't want to build a colonnade. He wanted to build a Celtic roundhouse,

which he did because he had like an in with all of the builders. And so you'd see him go around the site like clapping people on the back and like lightly threatening people to make stuff get done on time. But his wife decorated the house. And one of the things that she put in the house was a little like maybe two foot tall statuette of an alien. Like a, you know, a gray alien from the 90s. Smoking a massive blunt. Oh, hell yeah. Fucking hell yeah.

Fucking like a t-shirt you could buy on like a seafront stall in Marbella in the mid 2000s. Yes. Bugs Bunny spanking Lola Bunny on the ass in my Celtic roundhouse. I'm gonna see if I can find a picture here to put it in the Zen group chat. I'm also very taken with the idea of like Celtic David Courtney, David McCourtney. Yeah, exactly. You buy an outfit from G-Star Raw, but you put butter in your hair just to make sure you complete the look. Yeah, that's fucking right. They put this in their music room. And yeah, no, just incredible.

Powerful. Very powerful stuff. I mean, the other thing that this embarking on this grand designs Odyssey with you has made me realize that we need to do is we probably need to do an episode on cursed like British reality TV of the mid 2000s. Oh, big brother and stuff. Yeah, big brother fucking wife swap. I remembered the other week. Now there was a show. Wait, there was a show like because I mean that was a show called wife swap. There was a joke in Chappelle's show. There was a whole skit about trading spouses.

I didn't realize the Brits did it for real. Oh, we fully did. Yeah, I don't think they were supposed to have sex. I'm sure some of them did. Get another woman in to discipline your kids and cause havoc fucking rice. Yeah, it was it was like a big it was it was a whole thing. They did a celebrity one to where John McCrary seriously upset someone. I just recall this as like kind of a token of the type of personality that would be attracted to being on these shows. And I just recall this, you know, as you mentioned it, that the guy who won the first season of Survivor, I believe he either won or he was second place.

But he did very, very well in Survivor was subject to, I believe, a criminal charge if not a like a formal like a legal complaint. Because when he got back from Survivor from all of the stuff they had been doing, his adopted son, who was probably 10 or 11, had like gained some weight. While he was gone. So he basically decided to like put his tween child through like aggressive Marine boot camp at home. And like, my God, like forced him to get up in the morning and go do long bike rides and rock marches and basically just like punish him and like humiliate him for having gained a little bit of weight. And I was like that to me is such a window into the personality of the kind of human being who'd be like, yes, I want to get humiliated on TV. And like, I'm not going to say I've never recovered from it. But like having seen that window or having seen an interview after the first guy was let go from the first episode or the beginning of the season of American Big Brother, where the guy compared himself to Jesus.

I was just sort of like, this is these are weird people and like you kind of just don't want you just you don't want to use a slightly woo term. You don't really want that energy in your life in any capacity. I mean, off topic, but I'm just looking at the picture that Alice sent of this Celtic roundhouse and it looks like the fucking Dr. Phil House. Yeah, but it's got a weed smoking alien in the bottom. What the fuck is going on with that pool room? That's absolutely incredible. The sofa was like is divided up into individual seats with armrests with car holders. Dude, I got to tell you this, a friend of mine in high school, his dad like got really rich in the 80s and early 90s doing like he just knew how to operate video editing equipment.

And so he just like made TV ads for local TV for businesses around Indianapolis and like made a ton of money doing that. Because like at the time, you know, sort of the podcasting of its day, few people knew how to do it. And he designed a custom home that he had built that had like his own karate dojo because his dad was super into karate, of course. But the style was not too dissimilar. What the fuck is a dojo? It's just a room. Yeah. What are you doing to make it? It was like a separate annex with all the karate stuff. Paul has spent 25 million pounds trying to redo the opening segment of the animatrix.

But what I will say is that the design was basically like early 90s, late 80s, Memphis style everywhere. Everything was like gray and neon pink throughout the entire house. Like this was the design approach through the whole thing. If I remember correctly, the house was gray on the exterior with hot pink trim. Like it was fundamentally an Essex house. One of one of the strangest homes I've ever been in. And the fact that it was in, you know, suburban Indianapolis made it even stranger. So in a way, like we can laugh at Britain, but that that impulse, you give people money when they're good at something,

they may not necessarily have taste and chances are good. You do wind up with a Celtic roundhouse with an alien. What kind of house is Riley going to build? I think the thing, I think, and that that does highlight, I think a key difference between like the British grand design, because like the British grand design cycle is always, it's always like some like big architectural project that like some architects are like salivating over. Whereas like the American one is like a monstrosity more in the traditional sense. It's like incredibly vulgar, like the Dr. Phil house, like everything's fucking gold

or like everything's like monster energy print or like whatever it might be. Like it's something that's like so completely divorced from like, I feel like the American mansion of that. So completely divorced. You could have just stopped. Yeah. The American mansion of that nature. It feels like something a 14 year old boy would build almost always.

Well, you know what? This is what happens karate house when you give dudes money and they can design things however they want. Like you think that there's like money equals access to stuff so that you have like a better sampling of things and you just have more options. But no, in the grand scheme of things, you give dudes money and they build the house version of the way Kevin Smith dresses himself. It just happens that way every single time. Yeah. Women women be shopping, but men be building men be wearing floor length shorts.

It just happens. Yes. Let me build the limb biscuit out. Build the house out of like structural denim. Oh, someone's. Someone's done that. I remember once Emma and I were looking at Airbnb's in on like nearest the West Coast in the States and we found one in Idaho where someone had built a giant wooden house that was in the shape of a dog. So you had to like go into like the bottom of one of the legs and then got like a spiral staircase into the body of the house, which was like 20 feet off the ground.

Absolutely insane. I just want to have a house. I just want a normal house. I just want to like shoot bottles and cans off of a fence. Yeah. It's you know what it is. Alice has spent 25 million so far on the specially designed shooting fence. Yeah.

There's like a piece to camera with Kevin McLeod and it's me and Chris and Chris just looks like furious and disappointed. And I'm like, well, the only way out is through and I've got another 5 million pounds in credit to finish this fence. Yeah. I'm hoping that I can leverage that. The camera pans around that it's like a relatively normal clapboard house, but the shooting gallery part is that you're using a Davey Crockett bazooka. There's one lead shielding. Yeah. Shooting galleries had to be specially imported from Germany because it's made of a new kind of concrete glass mixture, which will enable the cans to balance even in extreme weather.

Just cuts like a builder just shaking his head. Yeah. That's what my grand design would be. That's what my grand design would be. Yeah. You're wearing a Lithuanian army uniform with traffic warden rank slides. Directly directing the fucking builders with a conductor's baton. Well, like this leads me to a question, which is that like if you had this kind of money and you had also been like hexed by one of those witches who's trying to hex the Taliban.

TikTok grand design switches. Yeah. You have a large amount of money and a large amount of credit, but you can't just build a normal house. You have to build a weird house. What's your deal going to be? What are you going to fucking going to try and do with that money? Because I'm definitely doing the like building the deadly lead lined kill house. Alice wants to live in a paintball arena.

That's right. I'll tell you, it really depends on where I am. But one time out of curiosity, I was looking at how much stuff cost in areas around the part of Southeast London I live in. And I just took off the budget limit and was like, fuck it, let's just see. And I saw going from like price high to low, like some kind of French king. Yeah, exactly. And I found I found a very nice like four story townhouse row house in New Cross that had been remodeled in a style that I would basically describe as sort of like contemporary mid century modern plus Persian carpets, but with some really weird art choices. And in one place in the bedroom, there was that same design, like mid century modern wood furniture, very nice Persian carpet, you know, Wayne scotting, skirting boards, you know, crown molding, and then an enormous painting of an anime girl with huge tits.

And I was sort of like, in a way, like this is pretty unambitious, I suppose, because yeah, it's not like a new a nuclear kill house like we were describing with Alice. And I can only imagine for Milo that he was like, you know, I hate Mitt Romney, but I want his car elevator for my multiple BMWs. But I think for me, it's more like there's a challenge to like the detail and very tastefully sort of, you know, being able to dial in every detail of what you want. And like maybe what I secretly want is to live in one of those like isometric drawings of a house that people share on fucking Pinterest. But like, I just kind of want to have a place where I can dial in the details for like, in accordance with my taste. You can have giant anime paint. Exactly. And it's like, because if I had the budget to renew, to remodel and fucking furnish and decorate that goddamn four story townhouse in New Cross, I would have found a better anime painting. Like I just or I would have had anime paintings in every fucking room.

It's called consistency. You have the buster sword on the wall. Yeah, exactly. I would have rare materia housed somewhere in the building itself. You have like a stately home, like like a gun room, but it's all buster swords. He's got like a pink laser shooting into the air from the top of his roof. You know what? Don't don't knock my style. All right. It's very personal. I'm definitely a sucker for that shit. Like I 100% like one of my friends, parents have like a big end of end of row townhouse in Oxford, which they've built a massive fuck off like glass extension on,

meaning their house is like half like kind of like like Regency Splendor and half like Bauhaus fucking like futuristic shit. And it is absolutely my shit. Like I would absolutely do that. Like I would absolutely be like the Russian oligarch building a fucking like underground swimming pool and then a sub basement car park in my like, you know, 18th century townhouse. You want to like join between like some Regency wall and your new glass wall and Kevin Cloud enthuses about it. Yeah, exactly. So it plays with the light. I want to be I want to be the envy of my of my bougie Islington neighbors, you know, because I can never leave London now.

I'm too far down the rabbit hole. So what you're basically saying is you want to live in Jeremy Corbin's fucking mid-century council flat. No, that's completely know what I'm saying. That's the absolute opposite of what I'm saying. But you want to be the envy of your Islington neighbors. So clearly you want to live in a fancy million pound house like Jeremy Corbin. I see. I see what you mean. You're playing you're playing the sun with me doing a bit of comedy there.

A bit of a little a little joke on the on the highly serious Britonology subsection of the trash huge podcast. I was going to say, oh, yeah, because our accountant, the wonderful Nick, the accountant is always advising me that I could just like move to Nottingham and buy a house. And I'm like, but yeah, then I would be in Nottingham. There's a key flaw in this plan. Well, you know what, Milo? I do believe that someday you'll find a place for yourself. And I do believe that it'll probably have Mitt Romney's car elevator. And I do in my heart imagine that the BMWs will only get a very Mitt Romney.

Exactly. Exactly. We're all going to live on Mitt Romney's compound. Well, I suppose that brings us to the end of grand designs then, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Check it out, folks. Yeah, it's very entertaining. I'll say that. I did most of my parents' property programs that they would watch, but this one I have to say it has a certain something about it.

I'm sorry that I watched the wrong episode, but I'm glad I did because I feel like for my own sort of my own sort of. We've got more of a diversity. Sensitive nature. I like to see the one episode where the people come out stronger in the end and they don't fucking ruin their own lives. But this lighthouse sounds pretty cool too. Oh, yeah. You should you should check it out. It goes well.

There's lots of shots of this guy like hanging out in his storm room, which is totally unfinished, like bare concrete floor. All of the windows still have like tape on them. It's just like I can't even jerk off in here. No. And that is the real tragedy. That's right. Jacking off in a cagoule because there's no heating in here. That's the fate of the grand design.

There was genuinely a bit where like there's a there was a bunch of like construction materials stacked against a wall and somebody had spray painted. Please finish with an exclamation mark above them. And I'm like, oh, great. It's actually now producing like its own level design. It's got its own like instructional graffiti. Yeah, we've got we've got a fucking architectural poltergeist who's frustrated with the progress of the work. Well, Alice, thank you very much for making time to be on Britnology today. Absolute pleasure, always a pleasure.

You're a dynamo of opinions as always. Alice, is there anything you'd like to plug on this, your own podcast? You could also listen to my two other podcasts. Well, there's your problem, which is on YouTube or kill James Bond, which is available anywhere podcasts can be found. It's available at eonproductions.com. If you weren't following me on Twitter at Alice Aversandum already, I don't know how we're several years into this parasocial relationship. Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of offline hocks and it always surprises me because I'm like, if you're offline, great, good for you.

But why are you listening to this? I mean, the thought had crossed my mind the other day that if someone wasn't familiar with Alice saying that she'd not so hard to shoot down the International Space Station, then like two thirds of the episode we did with Alex would be unintelligible to them. Incomprehensible bits. You know what? That's the nature of the game. You know, you got to get in on those bits early and you never let go. That's how parasocial relationships work. That's right.

Get an NFT of Alice shooting down the ISS. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being Patreon subscribers and we will talk to you soon. Thank you for being a $10 Patreon subscriber if you're listening to this. Extra hocks. Oh, I'm building a Celtic roundhouse with all your $10 subscriptions. Oh, I've got a weed smoking alien. If you ever does finish the lighthouse, then you know deep down that like if you put you put a fucking your ear up against the window and hold you cup your hand to it during a storm in Devon,

but you might hear moan.wav emanating from the coast. A special, a special sea conch that goes. That fucking gray alien totally has a flashlight in it. Someone's fucking that alien, man. Oh my gosh. All right. Well, goodbye, everyone.