Nice Ahse, Darlin'

GSGC returns to our fancy modern flatscreens in an inauspiciously rubbish way, by means of no wifi in my hotel and a bit of fiddling with a USB stick the day after. For lack of anything better, your daring reviewer is watching a possibly-new episode of Grand Designs (More4, 9pm). Tonight's idiots wanting to build an inefficiently-costed house are a Sue Perkins-alike and a confused-looking bloke who are desperate to go live in a hobbit-hole underneath an old crumbling barn in the middle of a field.

Why bother with the barn bit and not just dig a big hole? I don't know either, but someone at the local council planning department thinks it's funny, because they've demanded our idiots leave the barn perfectly intact. What an awesome job that dude must have. It's like he knew they were going to be on Grand Designs and reckoned they could do with a bit more of a challenge. Perhaps he reasoned as I do, that the odds of anyone nowadays building a pretentious super-middle-class house in a field not being on some kind of telly programme are rapidly approaching zero, so he took a punt and is, as I type, sitting in his bedsit chuckling into his pot noodle at an irritating sabotage well done. I salute you, Mr Council Planning Department Man; you've done a narratively important thing. Hope the troubles with your wife blow over and you can move back in soon.

The reason we (and by 'we', I mean 'me'. Well, 'I', grammatically speaking) watch Grand Designs, in determined opposition to the reasons we watch most other telly, is in order to watch people succeed. Nobody cares who wins the Apprentice, we just tune in to watch shitbags be shitbags to each other, in an environment wher there aren't any non-shitbags around to get hit with the crossfire. Nobody likes the people who successfully pitch to Dragon's Den, they're all smug arseholes. But the ones who try to get 200k for a badger eyepatch factory: we'll watch those idiots all day. What awful people we are. By which I mean, what an awful person I am.

Except when I watch Grand Designs, and I have no idea why. By all the standards of the glowing box of judgement, I should be hoping this eco-hobbit hole falls down on the heads of these creatures who dare aspire to live in a nice house. I should be appalled that by the end they've gone and made a quite nice hole with a lovely view of some fields where they can sit and drink ice tea and say 'rah' with their friends. But I'm not. If I may sum up in my best Kevin McCloud impression, that's the real achievement of Grand Designs. Anyone can film some people building a house, but it takes a certain magic, a commitment to making you not hate people, a reminder that nice houses are nice no matter how irritatingly smug and privileged their builders, to make a Grand Design.

Tomorrow: GSGC watches something else, hopefully a bit more writing-worthy.