It trashed a £6,000 teapot collection; it set neighbour against neighbour; it made stars of Carol Smillie and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. Changing Rooms’ makers and contestants look back on their part in a TV treasure
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.
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