Arrogant architect finally meets his match

Architects are very often like doctors – in theory you’re the client or the patient, but the reality is role reversal, and the dynamic is that they talk down to you and tell you what to do.

Condescending doctors can be found on every hospital corridor – consultants have it down to a fine art – and the prototype for the know-it-all architect has his own series on RTE. He’s called Dermot Bannon and it’s called Room to Improve.

But Dermot, who behind it all is actually likeable in a weird sort of way, bit off considerably more than he could chew when he took on Longford publican Elaine Mitchell, a human dynamo who might well have eaten wildebeest for breakfast.

RTE milks this home improvement series like a prize cow – this was a repeat from last September – but in fairness, Grand Designs probably has its own repeat channel by now and DIY SOS is still showing repeats of revamps on houses that have probably been levelled to the ground for the last decade.

This was actually a repeat of a programme that had been updated for a previous re-run last September, justified by using that same formula deployed by Grand Designs and even Location Location Location of revisiting the house and the couple for a sort of reflective look-back on the trials and tribulations, both of doing up a house and having Dermot on your back.

But at the end of the day, the fact that it’s a repeat is irrelevant if you didn’t see it the first time – and as with a lot of shows in this genre, the actual refurb is secondary to the dynamics between customer and client.

You’d know that Elaine was no smalltown girl from the outset and it quickly transpires she’d returned a year or two from ten years in Boston where she’d run her own house cleaning business.

She bought the local pub in little Legan, a village in Longford not far from Abbeyshrule on the Westmeath border. And she’d had a little son Gavin with her partner Hughie, a man who was chalk to Elaine’s cheese, as relaxed as she was uptight, as laid-back as she was dynamic.

Hughie is a sort of gentle bear of a man whose only wish for the house is that he can still pull his car right up to the back door to unload the messages with minimum effort. Suffice to say that Hughie is now parking round the front.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.