Good causes don’t always make for gripping television. But entertainment value is a secondary consideration on DIY SOS: The Big Build Ireland (RTÉ One, Friday, 6.30pm), a reality series in which a team of volunteers works around the clock to create accommodation for people with nowhere to go.
Rather than merely entertain, the show’s mission is to help individuals in need. And few have suffered more in 2022 than those fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine – the focus of this two-part special, hosted by Baz Ashmawy.
‘I woke up – a lot of rockets,’ one woman says as she recalls the Russian invasion. ‘I feel shocked. I didn’t know what I should do’
He’s the ideal presenter for this sort of thing, his brash, bouncy personality offset by a teary streak. Waterworks are blinked back as Ashmawy talks to Tetyana, a Ukrainian grandmother whose son was killed by Russian forces. Now she and her family are in north Co Cork, where volunteers are moving mountains to make a row of 18th-century terraced houses suitable once more for habitation.
Kingston College, in Mitchelstown, is a community of 31 dwellings built in 1761 by James King, the fourth Baron Kingston, to cater for former tenants on his estate. Now six are to be restored for refugees.
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“This is our biggest build that we’ve ever attempted,” Ashmawy tells volunteers. “Your home, your community, feeling safe ... these are all things you take for granted. That’s what these people have been through.”
The team are up against it – and that’s without factoring in the challenge of putting manners on the adjoining gardens, to be overhauled by Diarmuid Gavin. (“You’re fleeing a war-torn place – you want simplicity,” he says.) Assistance is also provided by the interior designers Aoife Rhattigan and Kerry Hiddleston.
Any grumbles the volunteers might have are put in context by the experiences of the Ukrainians. “I woke up – a lot of rockets,” one woman says as she recalls the Russian invasion. “I feel shocked. I didn’t know what I should do.”
Everybody is on the brink of crying again. But these are tears of joy rather than trauma – and for that alone the Big Build justifies its screen time
The wheel is not reinvented, and stretching the makeover across two 60-minute programmes is arguably excessive. Yet you can’t but admire the volunteers and empathise with the Ukrainians.
At the end of the first episode (part two airs on New Year’s Eve) Tetyana and her family take a tour of their new house. They don’t know what to say: everybody is on the brink of crying again. But these are tears of joy rather than trauma – and for that alone the Big Build justifies its screen time.
