Digital T.V. is ace, especially free digital telly. The combination of the history channel and Dave means a chap can watch either a program about the Nazis or some macho broadcast about survival in a jungle at almost any time of day.
In the afternoons on Dave you can watch porky survivalist Ray Mears learning to bludgeon a deer to death with it’s own antlers in the traditional Navaho way. In-between bouts of Ray terrorising the local animal population and turning them into wicker spoons, there are lots of adverts. Long strings of dull adverts for manly things, because Dave is the channel for blokes, but still adverts none the less. I hate watching adverts so I switch over to another channel while they are running and watch something else.
That’s how I first got caught by Grand Designs – like members of the Who or mildly creepy comedians, I didn’t mean to get into this horrible perversion – it just sort of happened.
I should hate everything about Grand Designs. If someone at a party starts talking about their kitchen, I have to fight the urge to scribble on their face with a pen. Property bores the pants off me so much that I think about buy-to-let mortgages as an aid to delay ejaculation. Just entering Ikea or Homebase brings me out in a murderous rage that can only be placated by gin and Swedish meatballs.
The people on it are terrible. Smug middle-class types who have spent a life of wealthy mediocrity in a large detached house outside Surbiton are suddenly filled with hubris and a compulsion to build some monstrosity out of baked bean tins and concrete as a way of finally expressing themselves before they die.
They fret over window-fittings and spend thousands of pounds getting a shower that is just the right shape. One couple spent thousands having the interior of their house spray-painted to get just the right texture on their walls – and then used wallpaper instead.
It is everything I hate in an hour slot, but I can’t stop watching it. At first I watch the show with a sneer on my face, occasionally flicking Vs at the screen just to show how much I hate everyone in it, but after only five minutes I’m hooked, like the bitch that I am.
I really hope their build doesn’t go massively over-budget when they decide to get the cat flap made out of Tuscan Marble, I’ll think. Sometimes I jump for joy when they find that the asymmetric windows made from recycled spam fit in their oblong shaped floating bathroom.
I hate that I love it so much and that I’d do anything for another fix of it. Now, when I watch Ray on Dave, it’s only so I can switch over to Grand Designs and fret over if Mr and Mrs Grape-nuts have chosen the right shade of mauve for their Mock-Colonial mansion made out of old biscuits.
Watch With Mothers 
