Reality TV about housing makes a post-crash comeback
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 8, 2013 - 0 Comments
Networks are banking on a new cycle of housing shows
Who’s placing the biggest bet on the comeback of the U.S. housing market? Not Wall Street, but cable TV channels that run home-buying shows with titles like Love It or List It. The crash of 2008 wiped out a lot of reality shows about purchasing expensive homes; instead, channels like Home and Garden Television and the Learning Channel (TLC) shifted toward shows like The Unsellables, about people whose homes had become worthless. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, these networks are working on a new cycle of housing shows, though like many cautious owners, they’re starting with cheap homes: HGTV’s future projects include Power Broker and Fixer Upper, about helping young buyers improve their first houses, and TLC is bringing back the show My First Home after a three-year break. Network executives had better hope they’re right about the market. If not, the only people in bigger trouble will be those who actually bought the houses.
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Mike Holmes wants to fix the world
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 25 Comments
And he figures he’s got just 13 years left
A rhetorical question needs no answer, but sometimes it’s better to be safe than sorry. “Am I full of crap?” Mike Holmes barks from the stage, pausing just long enough to flash a teeth-baring smile. “No, I know I’m not.”
Even if they disagree, the teenagers before him—Aboriginal youth from across southwestern Ontario, brought together for a career fair at which the burly contractor is the keynote speaker—are unlikely to say it out loud. They’ve seen him on TV. He’s famous. Or at least recognizable enough that a bunch of 16-year-olds want to take his picture with their cellphones. At their age, Canada’s second most trusted man—trailing only David Suzuki in an April survey by Reader’s Digest—was a dropout, working full-time as a renovator, and living alone in a Toronto apartment where he wired the TV, stereo and all the lights to a panel attached to his armchair. Now he’s standing there, jabbing his finger in the air like Apollo Creed in Rocky, and pulling out every trick in the motivational bag to convince them to stay in school, and preferably pick up a skilled trade. There’s the scare: “If you quit, what the hell are you going to do? Work at McDonald’s?” Blandishment: “There’s so much opportunity. In 10 years, we’re going to be a million tradespeople short.” Even the potential for hookups: “I have met some of the hottest female electricians, welders and plumbers . . .”
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Can Holmes fix native reserves?
By Jane Switzer - Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 67 Comments
HGTV’s Holmes on Homes recently joined forces with the Assembly of First Nations and will oversee an initiative aimed at building sustainable homes on reserves
Getty Images
Mike Holmes, the most famous handyman in the land, has accepted a rather ambitious project: to improve the lives of people in First Nations communities. The 47-year-old host of HGTV’s Holmes on Homes recently joined forces with the Assembly of First Nations and will oversee an initiative aimed at building sustainable homes on reserves. “We’re going to make sure,” he says, “that all the products we use are mould-free, water-resistant, termite-resistant.”
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Aboot those LCBO bags
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 3:12 PM - 0 Comments
My favourite (non-political) blogger Dooce recently visited Vancouver, loved it, and then made an “aboot” joke on her blog, and all heck broke loose in her comments section. My favourite comment:
“i LOVE the accent. every time a show comes on hgtv that has a bunch of canadians on it i totally want one of my own. they’re so cute! i love them!!!”
This made me laugh because (a) my spouse has taught me to take a joke, even those involving Canadian accents, and (b) sometimes when I watch one of those home design shows on HGTV it feels just like any other U.S. show until I see something in the background that looks very familiar but completely out of context and confusing — and suddenly I realize that an image of those indestructible made-to-withstand-the-next-ice-age plastic bags from the LCBO is being beamed into my living room and I do a double take at the sight of Ontario’s government liquor monopoly invading my market-loving American television screen. Somehow the home design channel has become a Can-Con mecca.
(This just in: it appears the LCBO bag is about to become a collector’s item.)
