While most individuals would appreciate a house or business remodel, the results on Alan Carr’s Interior Design Masters are not universally positive.
So what happens when everything goes wrong?
The comedian has disclosed it everything.
The show’s idea is simple: ten exceptional designers compete for one life-changing contract.
In each episode, Alan and interiors expert Michelle Ogundehin put a group of designers against one another in a variety of tasks.
Whether it’s renovating a hair shop, a restaurant, or a showhome, the candidates must always meet a customer brief while also demonstrating their enthusiasm and stunning creations.
However, Alan has admitted that the outcomes are not always warmly greeted, telling Richard Osman that if the customer is dissatisfied, the crew would redecorate.
Speaking as a guest on Richard’s The Rest is Entertainment podcast – which he hosts alongside Marina Hyde, Alan was asked by the former Pointless host: ‘What happens if the makeover is awful? Does the production company pay to put it right?’
Alan replied: ‘Yes, sometimes the people who own the shop or hairdressers or the hotel room really hate what they’ve done.
‘What we do is we go back and paint it back to how it originally was so no one is offended.’
Mariana then commented on how interior TV shows have changed over the years.
‘I have to say, in the old days with things like Changing Rooms, I think they just left you with it,’ she said.
‘I think you had to sign the release form and, no offence to the designers in that because there was always that incredible time pressure element, they had to, like, glue gun and staple gun a lot of stuff… and people were left with these things!’
She recalled: ‘I remember once reading an interview with a woman who was so horrified by what her neighbours had wished upon her in one of those shows that she thought, “Right, I’m gonna have to research how to put this back myself,” and she got so into it that she discovered her passion and ended up becoming an interior designer!’
It is not the first time that the secrets of an interiors exhibition have been revealed.
Previously, people who worked on series like 60 Minute Makeover, in which a property is changed in, you guessed it, 60 minutes, have disclosed that it’s all a ‘lie’.
Craig Phillip, a professional builder who won the first season of Big Brother and worked on 60 Minute Makeover, stated that everything is staged.
He told the Daily Star: ‘It happens in the time that you see us recording it but it’s the planning and preparation off camera that you don’t always see to make us be able to do it in that time frame.
‘Let’s face it, what you see in the house happens in the 60 minutes because we shoot it in two 30-minute halves.’
The former reality star also told the magazine that work would have already begun before the cameras started rolling.
‘For example, for a kitchen, we are ripping out a kitchen and we’re ripping it out on camera, they only need to use 20 or 30 seconds of that kitchen being dismantled.
‘So off camera, we will go in, we will isolate all the boarded stuff, the electric, the gas, the water underneath disconnect it, put caps on everything, making sure it’s all safe.
‘The kitchen tops, we would have loosened all the plugs and undone all the legs.’
He joked that ‘on camera when they blow the whistle and we start and we go in and look like we’re Superman’.
Watch Alan Carr’s Interior Design Masters on BBC and BBC iPlayer.
