DIY SOS: The Big Build: a teary reminder of man’s capacity to be kind – review

Long-running and fathomlessly big-hearted DIY SOS: the Big Build (BBC One) has as simple a premise as any mass-appeal TV show could have: find a deserving cause, or a family in trouble, and make lives better by getting local builders to help them by doing some much-needed construction service for free.

It’s a series that, generally, works very hard to make you feel other people’s pain. But the setbacks – or “hard knocks” – experienced by last night’s recipient, 46-year-old roofer Darren from Hull, were of a scale to make you gulp. He was a strapping chap who’d lost his livelihood to a nerve disorder that now confined him to a wheelchair – that alone would have been enough to make most people reach out and help. But Darren is also a father to three teenaged sons, one of whom, Olly, has been disabled since birth and requires round-the-clock monitoring and care. And, by way of another hammer-blow, the boys’s mother and Darren’s wife, Sarah, died suddenly a couple of Christmases ago, leaving the family utterly bereft and struggling to get from one end of each day to the other.

The response to presenter Nick Knowles’s plea for help from the builders and building services sector of Hull was as generous as it was magnificent. Within 10 days, 100 or so skilled volunteers had transformed Darren’s cramped home with an extension that enabled him to sleep in his own bed for the first time in two years (he’d been camping in with Olly, unable to get up the stairs) and installed a lift that gave him access to the whole of his home, a new disability-friendly kitchen and bathrooms, and a slew of other struggle-easing additions.

People weep so copiously on TV nowadays that its affect has been diluted. But Darren’s tearfully heartfelt response (especially given that he himself had helped on a previous DIY SOS project) was soul-stirring – straight from the heart and not so much for the home improvements, one felt, as for the huge display of sympathy and human fellowship that he’s been gifted. DIY SOS may be an old formula, and in purely televisual terms not much happens between the opening dilemma and the closing big reveal other than building work and banter. But it’s a reminder that people really do have an enormous capacity to be kind to each other. And in these confusing political times that’s as life-affirming as everyday television gets.