Our Dream Welsh Chapel, Channel 4, review: nothing potty about this ambitious property makeover
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The cancellation of Escape to the Chateau leaves us short of a reality show about an ambitious restoration project fronted by a cheerful middle-aged couple with design skills, a can-do attitude and a wacky dress sense. It’s a very particular niche, but after nine series in Normandy, evidently a popular one. How to fill the gap? Step up, Our Dream Welsh Chapel (Channel 4).
Capel Salem in Pwllheli was built in 1862 and once welcomed hundreds of devout nonconformists. But Welsh faith having fallen off a cliff, it’s now a peeling shell with a roof bunged up by pigeon droppings. It caught the eye of The Great Pottery Throw Down judge Keith Brymer Jones and his partner, actor and textile designer Marj Hogarth, who house-hunted high and low for any big old ruin in which to set up shop and home.
“All these pews will have to go,” said Hogarth, while worrying about visiting commercial indignity on a place of worship. Also, the minister’s vestry is set to become the master bedroom, nudge nudge. Other disused Welsh chapels have become tyre shops or erotic underwear outlets, so she shouldn’t worry.
The delapidated chapel, with its side building, is, of course, the star of the show. An elegant hollow, its woody grandeur echoing with the ghosts of long-dead Calvinist Methodists, it’s perfect. And so too are moon-faced Brymer Jones and pink-haired Hogarth, thoughtful extroverts who laugh and cry as if to order in a splendid array of bonkers outfits: his ’n’ hers dungarees, statement specs, leopard print, sockless brogues.
With shows like these it’s never clear if chicken or egg comes first: the desire to renovate a property, or the funding to make a series about it. Brymer Jones talked romantically about the “algorithm of life” which brought them to Gwynedd. He even suggested some knowledge of the Mabinogion, and quickly learnt to pronounce Pwllheli.
North Wales is to be a lush supporting character. In the first episode, background colour came with a scenic tour of Portmeirion, and voxpops with town-dwellers who could remember getting baptised or married in the chapel. Unlike the chapel’s fungal and faecal whiffs, this show has a sweet aroma.
