Sensitive viewers may have a sinking feeling a few minutes into Dermot Bannon’s Celebrity Super Spaces (RTÉ One, 9.30pm) when Ireland’s most famous home renovator and his host, Vogue Williams, dissolve into giggles at the mention of Vogue’s “Willyman”.
This turns out to be a mildly naughty artwork of a man (plus appendage) that has pride of place in influencer Williams’ living room in Howth – a splash of end-of-pier froth amidst the supernova of pink that is Vogue’s vast Dublin Bay getaway.
“The Willyman…” says Vogue. “The what…?” sputters a baffled Bannon, who adds, “Show me the Willyman.”
“He’s doing well for himself,” says Vogue as they take in the artwork. Yes, it is going to be a long evening in the Bannon-verse.
Or not. Vogue’s willy wobbly wonder art is as ropey as things get in a briskly watchable new series that finds Bannon dipping a toe in the world of the “celebrity hang”, a genre pioneered in the late 1990s by Louis Theroux and which, in Ireland, has already produced such guilty pleasures as Lucy Kennedy’s Living With Lucy.
Here, the vibe is Bantering with Bannon – and if the results are slight and disposable, Bannon and his interviewees are good sports all. Smartly, Bannon does not outstay his welcome. Having swooped in on Williams and her husband Spencer Matthews (who waddles through shirtless), he’s then off to meet jewellery designer Chupi Sweetman, who lives in a south Dublin house with a gold staircase and whose mother – writer and activist Rosita Sweetman – resides in a charming flat in the basement.
Then it’s to Cavan and the converted church belonging to Ronan Keating and Nathan Carter songwriter Don Mescall. Bannon does not mention this, but in a previous life, the chapel at Quivvy belonged to Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry and served as the recording space for the goth duo’s 1993 masterpiece Into the Labyrinth – a piece of Irish music history that seems to have been chucked into the void and forgotten.
After that, Bannon heads to Limerick, where he meets designer Geri O’Toole, who helped Vogue Williams design her 3Arena-scale kitchen in Howth. It is a lesson in how the other half lives, with O’Toole revealing that for many clients, money is no object but that infinite choice can bring its own headaches. “That would terrify me,” says Bannon. “What would happen when the world is your oyster?”
RTÉ could have kept churning out new seasons of Bannon’s blockbusting Room to Improve until the sun turned into a red giant and consumed the Earth. So you do have to credit the broadcaster for trying something new with Celebrity Super Spaces. Here is feel-good filler that has no huge aspirations but which makes for amiable Sunday-evening window-dressing. It is the Vogue Williams pink countertop of television – a bit much, really, but perfectly pleasant for a quick visit.