If you're in the habit of watching television before 9pm, then you may be feeling a bit queasy about how unstable the world has become. This spring's schedule continues to be dominated by programmes whose organising assumption is that everything is on the point of turning into something else. Before your eyes the teams from Changing Rooms, Ground Force, Home Front and Better Homes promise to transform your habitual surroundings beyond all recognition. An inoffensive magnolia kitchen morphs into an American diner; a sedate herbaceous border makes way for a Lake District-style rock feature; a teenager's bedroom is transformed into a tart's boudoir. Even Alan Titchmarsh has been turned from something wise and cord-trousered into a larky foil for the strenuously sexy Charlie Dimmock.
For several decades children have been transforming their bedrooms into fantasy pads. But in the past three years, with the advent of domestic makeover shows, adults have been given permission to play too. Egged on by a chirpy band of designers, the participants/contestants/clients in Changing Rooms turn history into a giant rummage box of styles and disguises. Suburban sitting rooms become gothic halls, complete with stencilled fleur-de-lis. A council house kitchen is reworked as a Tuscan patio. And a few weeks ago, Jeff Banks suggested dedicating a corner of the GMTV house to a Buddhist meditation area.
In the garden, too, there is a childlike disregard for scale or context. Recently Home Front built a garden in a Victorian school, taking Sissinghurst as its inspiration. Likewise, Charlie Dimmock's water features belong more obviously in a stately home or a Japanese temple than in a back garden in Peckham.
If these programmes play tricks with history, then they aim to cheat time altogether. Both Changing Rooms and Ground Force impose arbitrary restrictions in order to give drama to their convoluted proceedings. The modifications to the house or garden have to be completed before an unsuspecting owner gets home. The idea is to show the viewer just what can be achieved in one weekend with nothing more than a few hundred quid, a brace of experts, a couple of television researchers, and the chance to scrap it if it all goes wrong.
Transformation rather than evolution is the name of this game. This is not about living with one or two considered pieces of furniture and then deciding what you'd like to add-the way most of us actually live. Instead it is about turning a bedside table into a "feature" by stippling it with gold paint and hoping it dries in time. In Changing Rooms, things are stapled, tacked and glued over the top of existing materials. Paint is sloshed on without stripping the wallpaper. The end result looks swanky but must feel odd to live with, akin to inhabiting a stage set. Two weeks later, surely the new layers begin to fray and shed.
The format poses particular problems as soon as you step into the garden. According to the self-imposed rules of Ground Force, there is no time to water a plant, let alone watch it grow. So Alan and Charlie cut up lawns, slap down patios, bus in potted shrubs and count the minutes until the owner gets back for "the surprise of their life." You get the sneaky feeling that a mature flower bed-or a mature anything-would send the Ground Force team into a worried huddle.
With the wiping out of time and history comes a flattening of social context. The houses in which these transformations are usually staged are late Victorian semis or terraces, just the kind of place where Pooter, the Grossmiths' comic snob, used to live. These are curtain-twitchers' streets which, down the decades, have been most alive to the tiniest distinctions of class. In Pooter's time a new piano, a second maid servant, the cut of a sleeve, were all signs that a small but vital social shift had taken place. Here were details to relish, ponder, and then use to place the subject exactly within an elaborate hierarchy.
But after Changing Rooms has turned someone's front room into a Moorish palace there isn't much pondering to do. All you can deduce about the owners is that they are exhibitionists for agreeing to go on television, and that they once went on holiday to north Africa. While the designers give advice about cost, feasibility and style, they never balk at a suggestion because it is, well, a bit common. By the time Carol Smillie and her team have stapled faux pony skin all over your three-piece suite, no one cares whether you call it a sofa or a settee, or whether you're standing in the sitting room or the lounge. The only time that class rears its head is when a few choice pieces from a mass-produced past are singled out and given an iconic, kitschy resonance. Flying ducks are fun, garden gnomes are cool, although Carol would be hard-pressed to tell you why.
Yet, while seeming to be outside history, these domestic makeover shows are anchored firmly to it; their popularity is a product of a particular time and place. Only Britain, with its tradition of home ownership, could support so many of these programmes (it is impossible to imagine the format working in France). In the 1980s, Thatcher turned a tendency into a passion by allowing people to buy their own council houses. By the end of the decade the dream had gone bad; falling property values put hundreds of thousands into negative equity. But as the market picked up, so did peoples' pride in how and where they lived. Struggling along in a so-so job makes more sense if you can spend your evenings calculating how much money you've made this month on your house. Getting Carol to help you celebrate by painting it pink is just the next step.
There is something ages old, too, about the dilemma with which the participants on these shows wrestle. Like all newly-minted members of the middle class over the past 200 years, they are obliged to reconcile the conflicting demands of individuality and conformity. The 1832 Reform Act gave the vote to urban middle-class men on the basis of the value of their house. To own property was to qualify as a politically significant person. But the moment middle-class man won his right to be considered an autonomous individual, he poured time and money into ensuring that his house-the basis of his identity-looked just like everyone else's. In the 1840s, wives, daughters and sisters were charged with the task of managing the domestic interior so that all the right signifiers were on display. A piano, a nursemaid, a proper parlour-here were proofs that a family had become "genteel." "Gentility" was not concerned with who your grandfather was, but about how you presented yourself now. It was about your choice of furniture, rather than its age. "Good taste"-an ability to pick and arrange the objects surrounding you-became the defining mark of a lady. But here was the rub: any hint of originality put you beyond the pale. The challenge was to be exactly like everyone else, yet still exceed them at the same time.
In the 1850s, a slew of guidebooks appeared, designed to tell the newly genteel middle-class woman how to pull off this trick. The best was Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861), in which Isabella Beeton instructed insecure readers about the right way to word an invitation or do a table placement. Careful descriptions of the duties of upper and lower housemaids were likely to prove useful to a mistress whose mother had always got by with a single maid. Here was a handbook for those busy erasing the ladder by which they reached their present perch.
Changing Rooms isn't like that, of course, but it does still display the central problem of how to define yourself as different while still hitting all the recognised cultural marks. Usually this means painting a bedroom bright orange or mocking-up a minstrels' gallery in the dining room. Original indeed-except that you had to wait for a BBC producer to suggest the idea. And then there is the problem that, following the show, 10m other people have the same idea. The man who came to paint my flat last summer said what a nice change it was to be doing everything in white. For the past year he'd been slapping up tomato reds and burnt siennas all over Essex semis. "It's that Changing Rooms," he said gloomily. "It's given everyone the same idea." Being a little bit different is harder than it looks.
