Around the millennium, Channel 5 was searching for the Jamie Oliver of architecture. Maybe they thought they could make architecture sexy or perhaps Boundary-Blur™ the profession and the public. Charlie Luxton, then studying for his MA in architecture at the RCA, was chosen and his life changed forever. Luxton is now an “architectural designer” (i.e. not passed his Part III) and seasoned presenter of architectural-designery type programs, the latest of which, I Own Britain’s Best Home, is currently showing on Channel 5.

Luxton, (www.charlieluxton.com) shares an agent with Kevin McHead-in-the-clouds and the presenting with two other “experts” - Mellisa Porter (former marketer and current lifestyle presenter, www.melissa-porter.com) and Russell Harris (presenter and property developer, www.russellharris.com). Melissa is the luscious eye candy and Russell the boring mainstay. In each program, each presenter stays in a selected home for 24 hours. The presenter then makes a case for why that house should go through to the next round and the viewers vote. The owners of the house left standing at the end get £25,000.

I Own Britain’s Best Home is OK! magazine rendered on-screen sandwiched between adverts for anti-aging cream and odourless self-tan. It sounds like it’s written by the script-writers of footballers’ post-match interviews and it looks like Footballers’ Wives but with neither the taste nor talent. Proving that taste is inversely proportional to wealth, IOBBH is more aimed at wannabe WAGs than an architectural audience.
Empty rooms are called “minimalistic” and needless, expensive technological gadgetry solves problems that didn’t need solving. Any design involved comes by way of pieces of designer furniture designed to look at rather than use. Every home featured will indubitably be waaaaaaay beyond the financial capability of the vast majority of the viewers. Thus the producers must see the program as aspirational – there’s even a “steal the style” section to each of the homes where the presenter unlocks the secret of how to recreate the house’s style in the comfort of your own home.

But what’s wrong with aspirational architecture shows? To borrow from Owen Hatherly in last month’s Blueprint, they are attempting a kind of “trickle-down architecture”, akin to the “trickle-down economics” of the 1980s that widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Hatherly showed that trickle-down architecture similarly doesn’t work and in IOBBH, the “trickle-down economics” is backwards with the money flowing from the less wealthy viewers (via the telephone voting) to the owners of the winning meretricious pulchritude who really don’t need the money.

You can’t blame Charlie for jumping at the chance of a media career – he’s undoubtedly having a better life than if he’d become an architect. But he’s no Jamie Oliver – he has none of the warmth, wit, presence, passion or criticality. You can’t see him lobbying government to improve school design. But the real disappointment is that he brings no architectural argument to the program. His level of commentary is no deeper than his cohosts’ veneer of approbation and his articulation of his favourite aspect of last week’s house: “It’s an architecty thing. I like it.” That’s what an MA from the RCA gets you. He has become a standard face for standard shows that ask for no more than standard clichés and he offers no more than asked of. With his choice of homes, he should be able to show that real architecture is about more than throwing money at self-aggrandising gimmick receptacles.

What is worrying is that it’s shows like these that define the public’s image of what architecture is. The nation’s architecture will not improve by rewarding designer piles, but by changing viewers’ opinions about the tudorbethan estates of peripolitania where the wannabe WAGs live and drive to a gym-in-a-shed for a run, before going to the supermarket-in-a-shed to buy a Jamie Oliver dinner.