CLAUDIA CONNELL reviews last night’s TV: Who needs a garage when you can have a gentleman’s boudoir!
How To Add £20k To Your Home
The Real Des: The Dennis Nilsen Story
Rating: 
Fancy adding £20,000 to the value of your home? Last night, a group of experts came up with a list of ten ways to do just that.
Well, sort of. Some of the ideas on How To Add £20k To Your Home (Channel 5) were hardly ground-breaking, with re-decorating and de-cluttering on the list.
Other recommendations were questionable on grounds of taste. Flamboyant designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen thought that garages should be turned into a ‘gentleman’s boudoir’ — or a ‘dude-oir’ as he liked to call it.
Former Changing Rooms co-star Linda Barker was among those giving tips on How To Add £20k To Your Home
His former Changing Rooms co-star, Linda Barker, suggested converting a garage into a home cinema. Linda claimed this was possible for around £3,000. The catch? You do the work yourself.
Later they stated that having off-road parking always added value to a property. But, hang on, hadn’t they just told people to turn their garages into cinemas?
Boiling water taps in kitchens were a great addition because, apparently, waiting two minutes for a kettle to boil was ‘from the Dark Ages’.
Homeowners were encouraged to knock down walls, encase their boring bungalows in wooden cladding and install stand-alone baths in the middle of their bedrooms. And forget expensive tradesmen, digging up your front garden and concreting it over was easy-peasy, too — all you need to do is follow some YouTube videos, apparently.
Most shocking of all to me was the revelation that Laurence apparently charged private clients £47,000 for his services.
But apart from the fact that it’s hard to comprehend how a tap will add £20,000 to the value of a house, the programme — mostly talking-head interviews with designers — was as dull as the homes many of us Brits supposedly live in.
Still, should any viewer follow the advice and start trying to build their own home cinemas or clad the front of their houses, then at least Channel 5 will have another series in the bag: Our DIY Home Improvement Horrors.
Horrors of a different kind were being discussed in The Real Des: The Dennis Nilsen Story (ITV).
Following David Tennant’s tour-de-force portrayal of the serial killer, last night’s documentary brought us the real-life story behind the drama. Several participants were speaking publicly for the first time and some footage had never been seen before.
The most chilling moment came during an interview with Graham Duffey, the brother of Nilsen’s 16-year-old victim Martyn Duffey. Originally from Birkenhead, Martyn had travelled to London to find work as a trainee chef.
After murdering him, Nilsen retrieved Martyn’s left luggage ticket from his backpack and took it to Euston station. There he collected the youngster’s belongings, including the briefcase he hoped to take to job interviews.
Instead, Nilsen used the briefcase of the boy he’d killed to take his sandwiches to work. Martyn’s chef knives were the ones Nilsen used to butcher the bodies of some of his victims. Carl Stotter survived Nilsen’s attempt to murder him but, tormented by his ordeal, his sister Julie revealed that he died a broken alcoholic aged 52.
All the families spoke freely, wanting to ensure their loved ones were not forgotten victims. And yet, at times, it seemed voyeuristic.
The drama told the story so well, did we really need a documentary the day after? As grimly compelling as the story is, it felt unnecessary and provided the sort of attention a narcissist like Nilsen would have loved.