For most of my conscious life, I have only ever watched TV shows that I enjoy. I have never understood people hate-watching something, or watching a show that makes them feel bad in some kind of voyeuristic, reflexive way. Until I started watching Escape to the Country.
If you've never seen it, it's a long-running British TV series where a couple (well, it's usually a couple), fed up with their life in the big city, wants to take a break and move to the countryside. A host--and this show cycles through a small army of them on a week-to-week basis--is charged with taking them on a tour of some adorable little English village like Fotheringdown-upon-Thames, showing them a range of houses that fit their needs and budget.
It's a property show, basically. From Location, Location, Location to Million Dollar Listing, if you've seen one, you know the broad outline of the series. People see houses, you see houses, you try to enjoy the experience. But you do not know the specific horrors that lie within a given episode of Escape to the Country.
This series is a collection of disaster movies. Every week I'm lulled into watching it by my own increasing desire to make a similar kind of move, and every week I put myself in the house hunters’ shoes. Yeah, I'm also fed up with all this noise, and yes, I too want to move somewhere with green hills, a small pub and no traffic. Every week the couple ends up somewhere idyllic, and I gasp a little at a cute river, some geese and a boutique butcher. I would love to live there!
Every week the camera rests outside a house, showing a beautiful little garden, centuries-old stone, a lovely thatched roof, and I start to imagine myself living there, making a cup of tea, staring out the kitchen window at some rolling fields, putting my feet up by the fire....
Then we go through the front door and BAM. HORRORS.
The inside of these homes are, to the last, fucked up in ways that haunt me long after the credits have rolled. I watch a lot of house shows because in another timeline I pursued a career in architecture, and while each has their ups and downs, I've never seen ones as dependably ghastly as this. Every time, every week, the transition from exterior to interior hits me like a jump scare. What looks like a postcard from the outside looks like a deceased estate fire sale on the inside.
I have lived in England, so I know not every house is like this, but also: why are so many houses in England like this? Why is there glittery purple wallpaper above a fireplace? Why do kitchens look like they were designed by MC Escher? Why does not a single piece of furniture match? What is happening in this living room?
Nearly every room in nearly every house that turns up on this show is a chaotic assembly of random pieces of furniture, garish carpet and the worst wallpaper you've ever seen. My mind, which appreciates coherent design, recoils in disgust every time someone walks through a door. And making matters infinitely worse is how we, international viewers, are continually gaslit by this. The hosts and couples walk around this swirling vortex of disorder and behave like it's FINE. "Ah, it has bucketloads of character!" they gush while inside a room that has CARPET IN THE BATHROOM. THERE'S A TOILET IN THERE. THERE'S OLD PISS IN THAT CARPET.
I know you can say stuff like this is subjective, but also, is it? My wife has watched her fair share of American and Canadian property shows and I, a man very into clean and minimal aesthetics when it comes to houses, have dry-wretched at the site of so many American interiors, to say nothing of McMansion Hell. But you know what? As repulsive as that trash is to me, at least it's consistently repulsive. It knows where its lane is, and it sticks to it. Every room in Escape to the Country is anarchy. Consistently terrible, but never uniform.
The show repels me, but also, I cannot look away. I want to hate it, but part of me keeps willing the couples through each new home, some tiny part of me hoping for a door being opened to reveal a tasteful interior, as though I was expecting anything other than the grisliest demise for the next victim in a slasher movie. And when it doesn't, I love wondering how do these people live like this. How did it get like this. I just saw an episode where a woman was deciding whether or not to buy a whole new house because she wasn't sure if her old couch would fit. MY LADY YOU ARE SPENDING £650,000, JUST BUY A NEW COUCH.
I'm sure someone from the UK can explain all this in a way that makes sense to them, but I am not one of you. I am just a man, relaxing on my couch after a hard day's work, unwinding with a drink and the lurching horror of hearing the words "grade two listed property" followed by the sight of brown carpet in a kitchen.
