Transformation, at least the sort offered by television, is as appealing as a magic carpet and as old as the medium itself.
In 1940s television ads, a genie appeared in a grungy kitchen, handed a new household cleaner to a frazzled looking woman and presto! suddenly she was wearing a sparkling gown and doing a Ginger Rogers through a gleaming wonderland of appliances.
In the 1950s, on a game show called Queen For A Day, five women tearfully explained why they desperately needed a new appliance. The woman who elicited the most sympathy got to wear a crown and ermine stole as she received an array of consumer goods from a court of beautiful models.
Transformation comes in many forms these days, but none is more popular at the moment than home "makeover" shows that offer participants and viewers instant gratification and the illusion that they are changing their lives - all without leaving home.
Part game show, reality TV and how-to-do-it-yourself guide, successful versions of such shows push several of our buttons as we watch - from a voyeuristic curiosity as to how the folks whose houses are being made over will react, to some of our deepest held feelings, beliefs and memories of home. As much as we might laugh or groan at some of the outrageous designs inflicted on homeowners by over-the-top decorators, there is nothing silly about these shows; the cultural currents of home makeover television run deep.
"The reason these shows work is that they are more than just how-to shows. They are emotional journeys; they're about people being transformed. On one level, there's how-to and the drama of how it's going to turn out," Paul Lee, chief executive officer of BBC America, said in a telephone interview last week.
"But I think they also to speak to what we feel about home especially, perhaps, our feelings toward home at this moment in time."
Lee's channel is home to Changing Rooms, which premiered in the UK in 1999 and is the prototype of the makeover show as prime-time entertainment. The New York Times described Changing Rooms host Carol Smillie, who started in television as the Vanna White of the British version of Wheel of Fortune, as "so beloved in Britain that she makes Katie Couric look downright unpopular."
The most successful American version of the show is TLC's Trading Spaces, which last season was nominated for two Emmys. Watched by 3.8 million viewers each Saturday night, it attracts a larger audience than network series such as UPN's Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the WB's Angel. With episodes also airing weekdays, its aggregate weekly audience, according to Nielsen research, is more than 11 million.
Both shows invite two pairs of neighbors to each redecorate a room in the other's home. With the help of professional decorators, a carpenter and a budget ranging from $800 to $1000, each team has two days to make magic - or a mess - out of the living space they invade. It's makeover meets the game show.
This week, Bethesda's Discovery Channels, which owns TLC and distributes BBC America here, is offering a feast of home makeover programming. A six-hour, 12-episode marathon of BBC's Changing Rooms begins Thursday on TLC at 5 p.m. and is repeated the next day at 9 a.m. Then on Saturday beginning at 9 p.m., TLC also will present Trading Spaces: London, featuring the American makeover team in London transforming the bedrooms of Brit neighbors.
In part, the programming stunt is intended to expose more American viewers to BBC America. While TLC is in virtually all 84 million homes with cable, BBC America is in only about half that many.
There are now variations within variations of the home makeover programs all over the dial. The best is BBC America's Ground Force, which features a team of gardeners and landscape experts who spend two days transforming drab back yards into fabulous gardens. The owners, who have not been allowed to oversee the process, are then brought home and dazzled by the changes.
Other cable channels are jumping on the bandwagon with versions tailored to their niche audiences. Last month, Rock the House, which features a pop star redoing a music fan's favorite room, debuted on VH1. In the first episode, Sammy Hagar, former lead singer of Van Halen, plots with one fan's wife to turn her husband's den into a sleazy looking neo-Polynesian, tiki-tacky bar. When the redesigned room was unveiled at the end of the show, the young man fell to his knees before Hagar, bowed and shouted "I am not worthy."
As colorful as that ending might sound, it is not worthy of the best episodes of Trading Spaces and Changing Rooms, which often involve owners returning home with the host to discover a room they loathe. Tears, anger, incredulity, frayed friendships and language not to be printed in a family newspaper are all part of the package.
I became hooked on Changing Rooms over the summer when I happened upon an episode in which designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen turned the living room of a mild-mannered London couple into an insane black, white and scarlet zebra montage that only a drug dealer high on his own goods could like. That episode airs at 7:30 p.m. Thursday on TLC.
Both Changing Rooms and Trading Spaces rotate through a half-dozen or so designers, but Changing Room's Llewelyn-Bowen with his leather pants and flowing shoulder-length hair is the piece de resistance. In my all-time favorite episode, "Handy" Andy Kane, the practical, brilliant and very working-class carpenter, gets so angry at Llewelyn-Bowen that he shoves the designer into a swimming pool - to the delight of Smillie, who had been mimicking Llewelyn's hair flip and superior ways. Alas, this episode is not part of the marathon.
Still another episode is nearly as deliciously flipped-out in terms of design. It features Oliver Heath, a decorator every bit as in love with himself and as deaf to the ideas of the homeowners as Llewelyn-Bowen. Heath turns the bedroom of a quiet young couple into a violet-and-silver nightmare with mirrors on the ceiling and a bed adorned with a faux fur blanket and hundreds of metal eyelets around the edges. And when you lie in this hideous bed, your eye goes to the nude midsection of a mannequin on a pole. This Freudian journey inside the strange and obsessive mind of Heath airs at 6:30 Thursday.
Sometimes the designers get it right, as in the episode in which designer Michael Jewitt turned a boy's room into a construction site with a climbing wall, a bed made out of pipe scaffolding and accents that look like construction tape. The parents wept with joy when they saw what Jewitt and their neighbors did with their son's room.
TLC's acting general manager and vice president of programming, Roget Marmet, agreed with the BBC's Lee that these shows tap into emotions connected with the idea of home.
"There are real emotional stakes involved in terms of jeopardy. These are people who have given up control of a room in their house. And what's more private and personal than our home?" Marmet said in a telephone interview last week.
"I think the success of Trading Spaces is tied to our feelings about home - at least, that's part of what we are hearing in focus groups," Marmet added.
Both programmers also think there might be a link between ratings growth during the last year and how attitudes toward home have intensified among American viewers since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
As Lee explained it, "The other day, one of the researchers was saying to us, 'This is a moment when people want to feel secure. They don't want to travel so much. They don't necessarily want to put out an extra few hundred thousand on a new house. This is the moment where people are actually down at Home Depot trying to figure out what to do with their lives.'"
Dr. Robert J. Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, says the programmers are on the money in their belief that the success of their makeover shows is tied to our feelings toward home these days.
"You've got this notion of home that is still so powerful in American life. You see it in greeting cards. You see it in Thanksgiving and Christmas television specials - everywhere in the media, especially this time of year. So, the idea of home, with feelings of warmth and security, is still very much intact," Thompson said.
But only as an idea, not as reality.
"In real life, most homes are not like this," Thompson says. "The average person has something like 12 jobs in a lifetime; they're moving all over the place, going off to college, and all the rest of it.
"Home used to be something that you created through long years of living somewhere - 'That's the tree me and my father planted when I was a boy,'" the Syracuse professor said. "Now, we manufacture it by buying stuff at Home Depot. We buy the materials and make a grapevine centerpiece to make the place in which we live feel like it has roots.
"From Martha Stewart, Home Depot and the Home & Garden Network, to Changing Rooms, Trading Spaces and Ground Force, it's a way of trying to hold onto that old-fashioned notion of home in a time when that's not really how things go any more," Thompson said.