A girl can never wear too much pink, or have too much wine (apparantly!) :o) Jo
A girl can never wear too much pink, or have too much wine (apparantly!) :o) Jo
Member since:22.03.2004
Reviews:65
Members who trust:37
For many years we have had inflicted upon us cheap and tatty DIY shows, such as Changing rooms (budget around £500), DIY SOS, hardly cutting edge design here, Home Front (bit better but still with Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen), Ground Force and a variety of other home makeover programmes. Imagine if you could scrap all of these programmes and erase them from your memory. Take a slightly better class of design programme, Grand Designs for example. Now condense the process into 7 days, add a tear jerking story to the build, get loads of free stuff and an annoying American to present it and there you go. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is fronted by Ty Pennington who started life on the American version of Changing Rooms 'Trading Spaces'. Ty is assisted by a whole host of regulars including Paul DiMeo, who is a carpenter and always seems to have too many things to do. Paul frequently is in tears at the end of the show. Paige, Tanya, Constance and Tracy make up the female contingent for the show alongside Michael, Ed, Preston and Eduardo (who was a recording artist). Not all of the designers and carpenters etc. are
found on site at the same time, there is a rotation of team members but Ty is the constant presence.
The show is basically people doing good things for other people. If you want to get on the show you should be seen to be really deserving in my opinion. Families that have appeared on the show have experienced a myriad of woes, including deaths in the family, major illnesses, redundancies meaning that the family cannot afford to live. This story taken from the abc network website is the kind of thing you will be confronted with:
Glen and Jennifer Elcano were living their dream. They used to spend practically 24 hours a day together running and operating their small family farm in Bakersfield, California. He would harvest feed and hay while she drove the bale truck behind him. Then, one fateful day, Glen was driving home from making a delivery to another local farm when a car pulled out in front of him. He was killed instantly in the accident. Now Jennifer and her two young children are barely managing the farm on their own. She and the kids have hardly had time to mourn Glen's death, much less to keep the farm running or make repairs to their small 100-year-old dilapidated farmhouse.
Of course there are some stories that are heart-warming because they are examples of families that have done good things for other people and who deserve something in return although there is always a problem with their house as well.
Kassandra Okvath, who lives with her family in Gilbert, Arizona, has battled cancer since doctors discovered a tumor in her kidney in 2003. While Kassandra was fighting for her life, her mother, Nichol, moved from their home to be nearer her daughter. Meanwhile Kassandra's father, Bryan, lost his truck-driving job for missing work during his daughter's illness. In the video she sent to the show's producers, Kassandra's simple, selfless request was that she wished that the children struggling with illness at the University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona -- where she has been receiving treatment -- might be given something very special. She asked if the walls of the hospital could be painted for sick kids because, as she said, "Sometimes that's the last things they see."
Obviously the family went to paint the hospital with some workers and the team moved in to re-build the family home under the pretence of just redecorating it!
The format of the show is always the same; the designers watch the application video which often results in a few shed tears from the design team. The team then pull up to the house in a coach early in the morning and proceed to wake up the family with a megaphone. Personally I don't think that the families are that surprised but you never know they may not have seen a full sized luxury coach pull up outside their front door! Nevertheless they all seem ecstatic when they come spilling out of the house.
The family are sent away on a luxury holiday and then the fun begins. What follows next is varying degrees of carnage and destruction the house is demolished in its entirety or just partially. A contractor comes in and starts to re-build or extend what's left and the team put in the finishing touches. What we are then left with is usually a magnificent home that will take your breath away and then the family comes home.
The popularity of this show in America must be huge as there are always loads of members of the public waiting on the other side of the road for the family to come home. When the family get home the view to their house is blocked by aforementioned luxury coach and the crowd start the chant of 'Move the bus, move that bus!
What follows then is more often than not a flood of emotion from the family and a lip biting, wobbly bottom lip from me. Without fail this programme always makes me slightly emotional and more often than not I have an escapee form a tear duct! After the family has been shown around their new pad the guys at abc bring out the big boys and spring a few last surprises on the family, previously this has been a collegefund for the kids, the mortgage payed off, cheques for $50,000 for bills and stuff and new trucks or cars. The most memorable was the story above (the farm one) where all of neighbouring farms reseeded the hay fields for the family and filled their barn with hay bales so they could stay in business.
So basically what we have is a renovation show with a difference, the people are needier and the team are shinier, happier people than their British counterparts. The whole show generally has a lot more polish than something like Changing Rooms for example, in addition, there are obviously lots of free things given to the show as they seem to have a great deal of free advertising or product placement for a variety of items. The most notable of these is Sears.
I don't begrudge this show it's popularity. The presenters are often heard saying that it's not about making the biggest most expensive and extravagant house (although some of them are) but more about making a difference to the families and I for one can't fault it on this. What does get under my skin is Ty with his megaphone screaming about how they only have 2 hours left until the family get home, work work work!!! To me this goes a bit far and you don't need this extra bit of tension thrown into the mix of what is already an emotional show. It just becomes a little bit too much for me and I often end up wanting to stick the megaphone where the sun doesn't shine.
For more information and some background on some of the families you might have seen on the show please visit http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/index.html?ad=EMHE
If you just want to watch the show check out UK TV style where it is shown at least once a week around 8 or 9 pm, make sure you have some tissues handy though. For those of you who just can't get enough of the show you can now catch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, How'd they do that at various times on UK TV Style as well where you get to see a bit of the work that goes on in the background that doesn't make it to the final edit of the main show.
All in all I give this programme 4 stars for making a difference to peoples lives, if there was no megaphone it might have sneaked 5 stars but alas, it was not to be.
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Wow, I didn't appreciate the big scale of everything they put into the show and how generous they were! This would definately ahve me welling up...
baalzamon 25.04.2006 11:35
I've seen a few episodes, in part, and I must admit it's lovely to see these needy family get helped out. Still, there's just a bit too much American cheese for my liking! John
docpov 04.04.2006 16:04
I have to admit to loving this show. The product placement makes me laugh too
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