Whoop it up

There is a programme available on television called Extreme Makeover Home Edition. It’s fantastic. The ingredients are quite simple but the execution is of the grandest style.

Each week, so it would appear – it’s easy to forget that the programmes are edited to a weekly format, they take a family who have applied and been selected to undergo a transformation in their domestic arrangements, hence the title.

The programme selects those families that have a great AW factor. A tragic death in the family from a disease or unfortunate accident or act of violence works well as well as other wholly sympathetic domestic reasons. The chosen family are then whisked away while teams of every available skill necessary to build a super home that is literally jaw-dropping in terms of scale, or amount of bad taste or kitsch, are called on to re-home the family. But not until the previous hovel, shack or shanty is blown to pieces in a splendidly Hollywood action movie style.

What all this activity brings about is a general feeling of massive sympathy, concern, care and ultimately tear jerking, hugging and back slapping congratulations from all to all concerned.

In the UK we have makeover programmes too. But there the similarity ends. A most recent one in the UK is Ground Force, where a team of professional gardeners and a builder transform a shabby patch of garden into a kind of themed space. In terms of a makeover, it’s as if they had simply rearranged the items on a coffee table when compared to the changes in Extreme Makeover. It serves to state the differences between the way we are as British and the way the Americans are as Americans.

The way the makeover is celebrated could not be any more different.

In the UK, the new garden is celebrated with champagne naturally, but with the family being grateful and selfless while being watched by a few neighbours who helped keep the secret and may have made scones for the celebrity design team during the transformation.

Extreme Makeover Home Edition does it slightly differently. The family arrive in a stretch limo and are hidden from the new home by a bus, whilst behind what appears to be the inhabitants of a small town are whooping it and thoroughly enjoying the anticipation. And when Ty Pennington invokes the crowd to shout his catch phrase requesting the bus driver to move his vehicle, then all hell breaks. The cameras catch faces with quivering lips, eyes that are filling and overflowing with tears and all the human reaction to story milked for every ounce of emotion.

This is no place for polite applause. There are whoops and cries of joy beyond measure.

There is a legend of restraint in Britain that for centuries is marked by not showing too much emotion if any at all. It is our way. My reaction to the American way is to see it as vulgar, insincere, over-the-top schmaltz – a typical Hollywood movie finale.

But that is changing. In the UK the growing generation is adopting the American way and it is sincere. We can on occasion whoop and cry with the best. We now see ourselves perhaps see it a safe thing to do without attracting ridicule and laughter.

The Americans naturally do celebrate and be thankful. There greatest day of the year is Thmksgiving day after all. I think the root is being a mongrel nation. People went there in very recent history to escape many forms of restriction and fear– financial, religious and political as examples. Or they were taken without any choice. Once there, they lived or fell by their own efforts, so success was something to celebrate. Not only was it there to celebrate, but it also served to show that anyone could have that success too. Extreme Makeover sums up the American way, because that’s what their early citizens had to do – undergo an extreme makeover of their individual and family lives. Here in Britain it’s been more a case of accept and adapt people with their cultures and ideas.

But the whooping and hugging and open emotion is seeping into British life, and perhaps it is no bad thing.