We’re through the keyhole and out the far side of the looking glass in the BBC’s latest slice of “only in a pandemic” light entertainment (BBC One, 9pm). This Is My House is a “who would like in a house like this?” caper in which four strangers pretend to be the real owner of a showpiece residence, and random celebs try to tell the legitimate mortgage holder from the mountebanks.
Twin Peaks feels like Today with Maura and Dáithí on a wet Wednesday by comparison.
So it's pretty wacky. But also hugely tedious. And that despite the presence of the reliably likeable Stacey Dooley. She is our guide as we visit the Ashford, Kent home of "Fern". But who is the genuine Fern and who are the plants?
Is it “Real Housewives of New Jersey” Fern? “Only Way Is Essex” Fern? The student-y one wearing vintage specs? Or the hip Londoner with the bottle-opener shaped like a rude appendage and the moving backstory in which his husband came out to him on what later transpired to be their first date?
The challenge of sorting it all out lies with under-employed comedians Bill Bailey, Judi Love and Jamali Maddix, TV presenter Emily Atack and special opening night guest, interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. They're shacked up in a socially-distanced lodge, watching on TV just like the rest of us as the four Ferns give a tour of their minimalist abode and then of Ashford (apparently famous for historical conjoined twins and its massive train station).
A whiff of desperation clings tightly to a format that surely wouldn't have got past the elevator pitch in pre-pandemic times. The celebs can't quite believe what they've been wrangled into - and much of the fun lies in sharing in their incredulity. At moments, Bill Bailey, especially, seems to be wondering if he's trapped in a dream within a dream like Batman at the end of the new Justice League. Don't we all, Bill.
With Covid putting the shackles on the creative industries, producers have been forced into weirder and weirder contortions. And this is one of the strangest yet. Fifty years from now it will probably be playing in a museum exhibit about the pandemic, next to a life-sized diorama of Ryan Tubridy hosting a socially-distanced Late Late Show, and a work of interpretive dance inspired by that idiot in front of you in the supermarket queue with their nose jutting out above their mask.
The real imponderable is not the identity of the actual Fern. It’s: are we really so desperate for entertainment that we’ve all been reduced to this? And if the answer is “yes” – the answer is yes – where do we go from here? Aside from out of our minds.
