Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud is at home in England when Grand Designs NZ presenter Tom Webster introduces himself. McCloud is in headphones and high definition, in the home office he uses to record his programme’s voice-overs. Webster is a little grainier, beaming in from a Queenstown house being featured in a forthcoming show. He has snuck away from the completion celebrations to join a Zoom call arranged by the Listener.
The reason for this meeting is that McCloud returns to NZ in February for live show Kevin McCloud’s Home Truths, a show that is partly an audience Q&A.
As a warm-up, we thought, who better to ask the oldest presenter of a Grand Designs some questions than the newest presenter of a Grand Designs?
Englishman Webster has just finished a second season presenting the NZ series – a job he balances with his Auckland architectural practice. McCloud has presented the original show for nearly 25 years, with the format sparking spin-off shows in NZ, Australia, Finland and Sweden.
In the initial greetings, McCloud jokes about whether his NZ counterpart had undergone any initiation rituals when he took on the role. Just a little light tarring and feathering, replies Webster, who says his time studying at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff crossed over with that of McCloud’s son Hugo.
Introductions out of the way, it’s time for Webster to quiz the guru …
Tom Webster: So on this live show, what can you do that you can’t do on Grand Designs?
Kevin McCloud: Well, for a start, I can meet my customers. If I had a tobacconist’s or a sweet shop, it would be very easy for me to know the age and the background of every single customer, just as it would be if Grand Designs were on a streamer like Netflix, where the data coming back about viewing audiences is microscopically detailed. But with terrestrial television, they take a snapshot from 500 boxes positioned behind television sets across the UK, which supposedly represents the entire population … so that means we get to know very little about the people who watch. It’s fun being in a place with an audience where they can ask questions, and we’re going to do some stuff with QR codes on their mobile phones so that we can do some audience surveys as well. Which will be good fun.
TW: So, live audience feedback as you go?
KM: Yeah, live audience feedback: Do you like the show so far? “No – 99% of people in this room say they want to leave.” That’s the danger you risk. With television, as you know, it’s hugely collaborative and you’re a cog and great and skilled editors make you appear to have fantastic … what’s it called? … timing. They also make you look more impressive and more erudite than you are.
That is what they tell me, that “Whatever you do …
… We’ll make you look good.” Whereas on stage, there’s no one to do that and you have this enormous responsibility to be entertaining. So you’ve got to tell stories and try to find some timing or some funny punch lines.”
TW: I guess there’s adrenalin there and there’s an excitement to that format that perhaps after 24 years of television you don’t get?
KM: Oh, no. I find with television, you need to summon the adrenalin because I don’t find that there are any nerves. When we’re recording, I try to make it a performance, but also just a conversation and sometimes it has to be a kind of delicate conversation with people. Whereas on stage it’s a completely different experience but it’s two hours every night of performance and you’ve got to be a showman, really. It’s nothing different from standing on the back of a wagon in the Midwest in the 1880s selling snake oil.
TW: You are selling your wares.
KM: Yeah, and the difficulty with the Q&A is you don’t quite know what’s coming. So it’s very good to know in advance what the questions are going to be.
But isn’t that what you’ve been doing to people for years – and what I do, as well – you surprise them? That’s the best, isn’t it? When you get an off-the-cuff reaction – the real person.
Yeah, exactly.
TW: Does this change of format speak to living in a very different media age where social media is quick-format, interactive entertainment for reduced attention spans? Whereas Grand Designs, in its storytelling, is almost a mini film each episode.
KM: Yeah, a couple of episodes we’ve done were an hour and a half long, which is getting into feature-film length. We have these assistant producers and researchers who are very young – by the way, the definition of television is being bossed around by people half your age – who say, “You stand there and you say this.” The point being is that they’re the key ones on the social media stuff. We’ve got an obligation to produce little promotional skits for social media. They’re often silly, like a little slice of a film, which I suppose has its role. I look at the way in which producers who are specialists in producing stuff for TikTok and Facebook and Instagram produce very compact and very tight little bits of content and it’s a completely different discipline to crafting a film which is an hour long. I always grumble. I mean, I must say this almost every day: “We produce long-form, traditional content. Don’t ask me to do a skit in three seconds and don’t then ask me to do it in 2.8.” I complain not because I object to it, per se, but just because I find switching from one to another is quite hard.
TW: Well, you’re doing all these other things to great popularity. Is it strange for you to be this bloke on English television who has a huge following elsewhere in the world?
KM: I mean, we’re in 60 or 70 countries but significantly in Australia and New Zealand. I’ve got lots of friends and family in Australia. I was very nearly Australian, because my parents had their Ten Pound Pom tickets and then my mother got pregnant with me. So I kind of feel very much at home there, and New Zealand, too. I got to know your predecessor, Chris [Moller], and his late wife Evie very well. I feel quite connected to both countries. I don’t mean culturally. I mean, personally, really.
TW: I sometimes forget that I’m 20,000km away. Working in architecture is very similar, too. But it doesn’t shake as much in England so you have to learn the seismic code. It occurred to me you have this ability to move between modes, you are an assistive thinker, you’re somebody who’s respected in different areas.
KM: I don’t know for certain that’s the case and if it comes from anywhere, it’s just because I have my interests and I have quite a strong, quite a teacher-y instinct for wanting to take quite complex ideas, and sometimes quite dull ideas, and find the juice within them and communicate that to a classroom or to a camera – it doesn’t make any difference. I suspect that it’s just my natural curiosity. Sustainability was for so many years a sort of fringe interest. And of course, it was a fringe interest in society, too. Now, it’s so major and so core to the issues of climate change that it’s become a part of everyday parlance, and so making programmes about it is getting a little easier.
TW: When you have had doors opening for you, and once you are through the door, do you feel like the person from the television or do you feel like you have an effective voice?
KM: You learn to know your place. Working in television, you realise that people want you for your endorsement, and they might enjoy your outlook, and your take. I’ve got friends who are in business, and they are chief execs or high-flying finance executives and lawyers. They become trustees of organisations and charities. I’m never asked to be a trustee. I’m asked to be an ambassador. And you think: “Oh, this is quite similar to my role as a television presenter,” which is like being the regimental mascot.
TW: If someone had said during the first couple of seasons of Grand Designs, “You know you’ll be doing this for another 25 years”, what would you have said?
KM: I would have said, “Oh, that’s amazing. That means I’ve got a job.”
Kevin McCloud’s Home Truths: Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland, February 5; Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, February 6; Christchurch Town Hall, February 7.
The season finales of Grand Designs NZ and Grand Designs: The Streets are on Tuesday, December 12, at 7.30pm and 8.30pm. The full seasons of both are on TVNZ+.
