A Different View: Why DIY if it’s better to see others doing it?

But when it comes to Phil and Kirsty explaining how to add value to a doer-upper in Essex, it’s like they’re taking the words straight out of my mouth.

Of course you’d knock through the dividing wall between the kitchen and the living room and create a big open plan space so beloved by homeowners today – and extending into the attic is as obvious as the nose on your face.

I can see the value in a rundown flat outside Glasgow when it features on Homes Under the Hammer and I’d know exactly how to squeeze every cent out of it in a budget-priced renovation.

Not alone that but without any qualification in auctioneer, I could tell you what it would fetch when it returns, fully renovated, to the market.

But the only two shelves I’ve ever put up in our own house are leaning from the wall at a definite angle. And I’d be wary of putting anything breakable up there because you couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t slide off or collapse the thing entirely.

It’s not just DIY; I’d watch football until the cows come home but I was never considered a player. My biggest – or only – attribute was that I grew quicker than others and therefore I could field a higher ball.

But the clear instruction after that was to give it to someone who knew what to do with it. And then they all grew up to a fair height, so my one and only advantage was gone.

READ MORE: A Different View: Do the fans want new music or smash hits?

And yet that only gave me a greater appreciation of sports people, to the point that I’d watch almost anything involving a ball on the box.

There are members of our household who are convinced that Liverpool play at least four nights every week, and that there are inexhaustible demands on these professional footballers who must put in at least a 35 hour week in competitive action.

The GAA championship season only adds another dimension to life in front of the telly – and that’s not taking into account going to actual matches to see all of this happening live.

I’d also listen to music forever, but I cannot play a note. I can sing but it should never be inflicted on the general public; the shower is the best place for that. And I love good musicianship and live gigs more than almost anything else on earth.

The talent and courage it takes to go on stage – on your own or with your band – and perform for a live audience is one of the greatest skills you can have.

Mick Flannery was kind of talking about this on stage recently – the courage it takes in certain circumstances.

He was making a different point because he was talking about the work that went into his first musical, The House Must Win, which is now on stage in the Everyman in Cork.

And his point was that he’s always written songs and never worried about the reaction because he only ever performed them when they were fully done.

But the creative process into writing a musical is entirely different and you have to share your work at different stages along its developmental – at which point someone else might very well tell you it’s rubbish and you have to take that on the chin.

So he feels it takes bravery of a different kind to work on a musical collaboration – but I think it takes enormous courage to stand under the spotlight and sing your self-penned songs to an audience of ten or ten thousand.

But all of this comes down to one question in a nutshell.

How come we love looking at things that we could just as easily do?

The obvious answer is that we can admire someone else’s skills all the more because we know what they do it beyond us.

If everyone could play Gaelic football like David Clifford, nobody would marvel at his skills.

READ NEXT: Groove Tube: Stay indoors reaps rich reward with new album

If we all could build our own homes out of matchsticks, there wouldn’t be fifteen channels on Sky TV that are fully devoted to people building their own homes – out of sticks, bricks, repurposed shipping containers, old boats or scrap.

If we could all write great music, why would be buy albums by other people? Ditto with books – I love reading them, but I know I’ll never write one because that’s not a talent in my locker.

A small bit of this is also down to laziness, attributable to the notion that other people are better at entertaining us than we would be ourselves.

And yet – in my case at least – it doesn’t stretch to the talents that you think would really matter.

I know there are channels too that feature people with medical ailments as they undergo the surgery that will sort them out, but these are people with boils the size or your head or hemorrhoids that they have to carry around in a wheelbarrow.

We should want to watch doctors performing keyhole surgery to remove a gallstone because that takes a lot more training that knocking down the partition wall in a terraced home.

But the only time you’d have an interest in watching gallstones being removed is if they were your own and you were in agony.

Funnily enough, I may be one of the few people in the world who didn’t watch the recent Artemis mission around the moon, even though it supposedly represented a new frontier in space exploration.

But they didn’t even land there to walk on the moon – and their biggest achievement was to lose all contact with the world for 20 minutes.

If that was all they wanted to do, they could have tried getting a mobile phone signal in parts of Connemara.