‘I mustn’t swear, I mustn’t swear’: life as a victim of a Changing Rooms makeover

Twenty years ago, when Caroline Hicks opened the door to reveal her new living room – renovated in just two days by her close friend Jo Thompson and designer Graham Wynne – three words became a mantra in her head. “I mustn’t swear, I mustn’t swear, I mustn’t swear,” the then 25-year-old thought to herself. Hicks’s plain cream Kent living room had been transformed into an “operating theatre”: the walls were white and her dining table was covered in aluminium paint. There were sandpaper squares on one wall and a permanently running water feature on the other. Hicks didn’t swear, but her lip visibly quivered. “Oh,” she said.

Hicks is just one of more than 600 people who appeared on the BBC’s home improvement show Changing Rooms between 1996 and 2004. The premise was simple: neighbours swapped homes and, with the help of designers, renovated a room each. With almost 12 million viewers at its peak, the programme was briefly a British institution – shortly after Hicks’s episode aired, a cashier in her local Habitat excitedly rang his boyfriend to exclaim that she was in his store. Recently, rumours began circulating that the show was to return after 16 years off-air. And why not? The daytime hit Ready Steady Cook was revived after a decade this March.

So far, the rumours remain rumours, but Changing Rooms has never left our hearts. In 2017, the Buzzfeed writer Scott Bryan collated 13 Changing Rooms refurbishments in an article that went viral: readers marvelled at arse sculptures, upside-down trees and bedsheets printed with giant naked cherubs. How can a show with so many disasters be so enduringly popular?

Changing Rooms was born over the course of nine tube stops between Tottenham Court Road and White City, half an hour before an important meeting with the BBC. It was 1995 and Peter Bazalgette, the owner of the production company Bazal, had been asked to “do for interiors what you did for cooking”, a reference to his previous hit, Ready Steady Cook. Bazalgette asked the producer Ann Booth-Clibborn to put together a pitch, but says the pair realised on the way to see BBC executives: “This idea sucks.”

Then called Four White Walls, Booth-Clibborn’s show would place contestants in blank rooms that they had to decorate; a judge would then determine who had done the best job. “I thought it was a pretty nice idea, but I just had this sort of ringing bell,” Booth-Clibborn says. She shared her fears with Bazalgette and the pair began brainstorming. By the time their tube was near Holland Park, Bazalgette recalls, they had their eureka moment.

“I said: ‘What would it be like if people – friends, neighbours – swapped houses?” Bazalgette says. “I had no idea what I was suggesting: the jeopardy only emerged during the series.” Booth-Clibborn suggested giving each team a designer and decorator; she would later create stars out of Linda Barker, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Anna Ryder Richardson.

The BBC accepted the pitch and Booth-Clibborn made a pilot, but it was not until eight years later that she truly understood what she had done. “It wasn’t until I bought my own house … I suddenly realised what people were doing by letting us come into their homes and change them,” she says. As a plucky young producer, she “didn’t in any way understand the emotional impact of what we were proposing”.

Both Bazalgette and Booth-Clibborn deny that they wanted anyone to cry. “I’d say I was quite naive,” says Booth-Clibborn, now in her 50s and a storytelling coach.

“The first time somebody really hated it, I was mortified and rather embarrassed,” Bazalgette adds. “I thought: ‘God, I wonder if this is going to destroy the series.’ In fact, it made it.”

Hicks hated her living room, and Thompson was no happier with hers. Before the show, the duo chatted about how they would like their rooms to be decorated; Thompson told Hicks she wanted an Australian theme. “I took it to mean Antipodean, outback reds,” says Hicks, now 45. She and her designer, Llewelyn-Bowen, painted lizards on the floor, accented the room with “the same colour that comes out of new-born babies’ nappies” (Thompson’s words) and bought a tribal drum. Thompson had been envisioning Bondi beach-vibes with cool blues and ocean decor. When she saw her new room, she said “No” six times.

The day the episode aired, Hicks and Thompson were doorstepped by reporters. Every so often, when an acquaintance catches a re-run of the episode, they have to answer familiar questions, such as: was it all really done in just two days?

“It really is done in two days. There are lots and lots of runners behind the scenes,” says Hicks. The show’s presenter, Carol Smillie, recalls that when runners went from house to house, she would roll white paint over their jeans so that contestants wouldn’t get any clues as to what colour their room was being painted. “There were a whole lot of us, 20 or more, that you didn’t see on screen.” Two decades later, she fondly recalls the onsite catering truck: “They baked us flapjacks in the morning.”

Jimmy McDougall and his wife Terry say their London kitchen was completed in less than two days and cost £16 over the show’s £500 budget. “The first day, you don’t start until about midday because they’re getting everything ready, and we worked until about 8pm,” 65-year-old McDougall recalls. On the second day, things wrapped up early so Smillie could fly home to her young children in Scotland (the McDougalls recall that the presenter, then a new mother, fell asleep in their bedroom for a couple of hours). “It was probably less than 24 hours that we spent decorating.”

With such speedy renovations, you may wonder if corners were cut alongside the MDF of which the show was so fond. “They only painted the front of the doors; they don’t do the back of them,” McDougall says – although the team did leave the couple with enough paint to finish the job. Hicks’s room was originally going to have a laminate floor with a rug in the middle, and designers told Thompson that they would only lay the visible edges of the floor; she fought back.

After just two years on air, Changing Rooms moved from BBC Two to BBC One; the McDougalls’ episode was the first to air in the new slot and attracted more than 10 million viewers. Terry, now 62, recalls the exact air date – 17 July 1998 – as the couple were staying at a hotel for their wedding anniversary. “We walked through the bar and everybody hummed the Changing Rooms theme tune,” she laughs. A year later, the show’s designers were invited on to Children in Need and sang a pastiche of YMCA entitled, “Why MDF?” while dressed like the Village People.

Why was the show so popular? Bazalgette says we all love a makeover and the designers were genuinely innovative. He credits Booth-Clibborn with casting capital-C characters. She “faxed every single agent” to find Llewelyn-Bowen and discovered Barker via a book she had written “about making things out of hankies”. Handy Andy (real name: Andy Kane), however, was cast simply because he was working in Barker’s home as a carpenter at the time. When he met producers, “he didn’t know it was a screen test – he thought he was coming for an interview to make sets for a TV programme,” Booth-Clibborn says.

Smillie was brought on board by producer Nick Vaughan-Barratt. She recalls laughing when he explained the show’s premise: “So, have we actually got to that point where the nation is watching paint dry?”

Within a few years, this relatively unknown cast became superstars – producers recall how local mayors would meet the designers at train stations when they arrived in a new town, and many were frequently propositioned in hotel bars. Once, when Llewelyn-Bowen and Kane went to a nightclub in Aberdeen to celebrates the end of a series, they were mobbed by fans and the police had to evacuate them to safety.

No wonder, then, that so many members of the public wanted to take part in the show (though Smillie still feels guilty that the very first contestants were “poor unsuspecting souls” who had been snatched from the application bin of Ready Steady Cook). We fondly remember the disasters (Bazalgette himself references a News of the World headline, “BBC turned my house into a whore’s palace”), but producers say contestants were mostly happy with their lot. “Most people’s rooms that they asked us to change were in such dire straits, even a bit of paint was a vast improvement,” Smillie says.

The McDougalls agreed to go on the show because it was eight years since their kitchen had been decorated. Remarkably, the result was classy not only for the time but also for today. The walls were painted pastel green and accented with dark green and cream tiles; a lemon fresco was painted over the window. “The only disaster was they had a great idea to paint my fridge-freezer and it was only a week old,” Terry says. “Every time you opened the fridge, it chipped.”

Aidan Ruff, 59, from Northumberland, is another contestant who loved his renovated bedroom (even though it features as No 7 on the Buzzfeed list of horrors). “We were basically looking to get a room done on the cheap,” he says, describing the end result as a “Mediterranean love nest”. He and his wife Helen didn’t change the room for six years – they even kept the Greek nudes carved out of MDF that lined their four-poster bed. Twenty years later, those two statues now sit outside the ornate shed that is a tortoise sanctuary the Ruffs built in their garden over lockdown.

Yet there is one disaster no Changing Rooms fan can forget. In 2000, a London woman named Clodagh appeared on the show and asked producers to be extra careful with her prized teapot collection. Barker and Handy Andy created a set of suspended shelves to house the pots; inevitably, the entire thing collapsed. Clodagh lost more than £6,000 worth of teapots, which also had sentimental value (a Clarice Cliff pot was one of her mother’s 21st birthday presents).

Now 75, Clodagh is not entirely over the incident. “I still don’t feel very good about her,” she says of Barker. “On the very rare occasions she’s on television now, when I do see her, she’s still very bouncy, and I just don’t think she earned the bounce.”

Insurers reimbursed Clodagh for the value of her teapots, but she never risked another collection (“I couldn’t bear it to happen all over again”). Still, she doesn’t regret appearing on the show, saying it was an experience for her daughter, Julia. She believes the episode is a good lesson in respecting other people’s property.

Four years after the teapot disaster, Changing Rooms was cancelled after 17 series, due to dwindling viewing figures. “Familiarity bred a little bit of distraction,” Bazalgette says, as viewers would tune in at the start and end of an episode and skip the middle. Still, the show demystified decorating for the British public (one crew member still remembers Barker’s claim: “Every room looks better with a bowl of limes”). Changing Rooms undeniably inspired a whole host of makeover shows, and in 2011, a show named The Apartment, featuring Llewelyn-Bowen, debuted in Asia; its premise was remarkably similar to Booth-Clibborn’s original Four White Walls pitch.

“I didn’t understand the cultural impact of Changing Rooms for at least 10 years,” Booth-Clibborn says. She was at a conference for the British Institute of Interior Designers when designers came up to her with tears in their eyes. “They said: ‘I wouldn’t have even known interior design was a job without Changing Rooms,’” she recalls. “It made design a meritocracy – when I came into it, it was just for middle-class people.”

Sitting on the tube in 1995, Bazalgette and Booth-Clibborn had no idea what they had struck upon. “It was a passing thought under extreme pressure on a train,” Bazalgette says. “How could I understand what it would become?”