TV Eye: Grand while it lasted

Silver fox: Kevin McCloud will no doubt take on other planets next. Photo / Supplied.

Be careful what you wish for. Grand Designs Historic Homes has been screening on weekdays on the Living Channel and on TV3 On Saturdays and Wednesdays (Grand Designs Revisited, which is not quite as grand as Brideshead Revisited but just a fancy word for repeats.)

We've already had (I think, I'm losing count of the number of times I've been revisiting) Grand Designs Abroad, and a worthy but dreary eco-designs series, but have so far been spared the spin-offs: Grand Designs Trade Secrets and Grand Designs Indoors. There is a magazine, an expo, a design competition. In the future, there will no doubt be Grand Designs in Space in which a cloned Kevin McCloud will visit those crazy aliens out there to see what they're building on other planets. He'll pop in to sneer - these people are mad, they've taken out huge mortgages in alien money, to rebuild a heritage space home out of reclaimed space junk. Then he'll smile like a fox, and offer up one of his little speeches about integrity and honesty and love.

Care to explain the appeal, the entertainment editor asked.

I've tried this before and I would have given it another go, but I've decided the appeal has worn off, like too many chocs at Christmas.

I'm over Grand Designs, after years of slavishly watching concrete dry, windows being edged in, awful weather, the triumph of hope over idiocy. And most of the people are awful, especially the eco ones, with their high-tech composting loos (not interested in the workings, thank you) and their walls built from re-cycled tires and bottles (it's design, just, but hardly grand.)

So having now given up so-called telly for grown ups - I feel terribly grown up now I've given up America's Next Top Model, and Grand Designs (I might have a peek at the reveal, which is what you sit through all that lime render slapping and top model pouting for) - I haven't got anything to watch.

There's a new kid's show, Paradise Cafe - a joint BBC/TVNZ production - on TV2 on Sundays at 4pm and it has Miranda Harcourt playing Victoria, a grand trout of a Cook Islands hotelier.

That sounded like fun and Paradise Cafe, obviously not aimed at old people like me, is jolly good fun. I admire its economical approach to setting the scene. Robbo (son of the marine biologist and Paradise Cafe owning father) makes friends with Raro-born, NZ-raised Tai in the first 10 seconds. "My friends call me Tai."

"What's your real name?"

"Tai. That's why they call me it."

All right, the dialogue might not be the sharpest, but it can be funny.

When Robbo's sister Megan meets spoilt miss Abi, daughter of the hotelier trout, she says: "I like your jandals. They're pretty fancy."

Abi says: "These old things? And I like your totally gross, ultra dirty feet."

There is a strange girl, dressed in a print frock and pearls, who turns out to be a sea ghost. There is a trapped sea ghost leader in a stinky black rock.

There were strange, ghostly, goings on in the cafe: a levitating milkshake, a chair and a cake. You knew the trout was going to get that cake in her perfect hairdo.

The paper the next day had a headline: Cafe Kids Gunk Stinky Vic. There was a ghost pirate, with the worst pirate's accent ever attempted on the telly, who slapped Stinky Vic on the bum.

Well, I laughed. The special effects are truly terrible, as is the set. There is nothing remotely grand about Paradise Cafe, but it is old-fashioned storytelling and more fun than composting loos.