Celia Sawyer has a bone to pick. “Everyone says ‘oh I wanna be an interior designer – it looks easy’,” says the expert in the leatherette catsuit. “It’s not. It’s a tough business: you need a hard head.”

But Celia has the last laugh. By way of compelling evidence to suggest no wannabe’s head is as hard as Celia’s, BBC One’s new series Your Home In Their Hands (Thursdays, 8pm) shows us all how over-enthusiastic amateurs can royally mess things up.

It’s been a while since the tiresome format of a home makeover show has been primetime telly fodder.

Endless repeats of Claire Sweeney and Carol Smillie running about on 60-Minute Makeover and Changing Rooms trying to liven up watching paint dry can be still be seen on channels such as Yesterday and Watch With Mother. Those programmes with their floral feature walls and hatchet paintjobs looked dated before they’d even been squirted on to the screen, but Celia, the cougarish, cash-savvy blonde whom you might recognise from Channel 4’s Four Rooms, is bringing home makeovers bang up to date for millennial viewers. And that means dashed dreams and sarcastic asides are part of the formula.

In the first episode, Yvonne and Dan of Portsmouth want to make their house feel ‘more like our own’… so getting some strangers in to decorate seems counter-intuitive, no? Not least asking the batch of half-wits the BBC has accidently recruited. Ah yes: out of thousands of would-be professionals out there, the television execs decided to hand the reins over to… batty American woman Kirsty who wears a cuddly toy tiger as headwear (a warning sign, surely?) and espouses ‘maximalist, opulent, psychedelic fairyland’ as the holy grail of interior design.

She and fellow amateur Nick are tasked with ‘zhushing up’ Kelly and Andy’s gaffe in Harefield while classy-yet-anal Janet and Anju (MO: “Austin Powers in a tropical location” ) head to Portsmouth armed with thousands of quid and an army of underlings. The Yank in the mad outfit takes great pleasure in slapping scarlet paint all over her clients’ bedroom ceiling and getting busy with the staplegun to cover every wall surface with different clashing sateen prints to offset the leopard-print shagpile she has hilariously installed. The result looks worse than it sounds: like a nightmarish comedown vision of Ana’s red room of pain in Fifty Shades of Grey (I imagine).

Disgruntled-looking amateur Nick mocks Kirsty, saying ‘I only use colours found in nature’ before ordering his minions (he takes the Andy Warhol approach to creativity) to tile the bathroom in Fanta orange. Surprisingly, though, his look is a hit... unlike Anju’s hyper-saturated kitchen of sunflower yellows, blooming patchwork tiles and stripy lino (which, to be fair, I absolutely loved) that makes her rather boring clients cry. And not in a good way.

Celia laps it up. ‘Haha, this is what you get when you get amateurs in, suckers!’ she manages not to cackle, but her smirk says it all. But most of the licence-fee payers who funded these monstrosities will be thinking: ‘Your house was fine before! What were you thinking?’, enjoying the greedy homeowners’ disappointment during the big reveal. In Peter Andre’s awful 60-Second Makeover and drinking woman’s crumpet Nick Knowles’s DIY SOS, at least the recipients of have sob stories and makeover-worthy hovels to earn them their charity overhaul. This lot with their showhome-standard properties and aversion to change (Dan and Yvonne execute a post-mortem over the old kitchen Anju ‘killed’ – dear God) deserve all they get.

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