So, have you seen THAT episode of Grand Designs?

I could watch episodes of GD all day long. Sometimes, I do. It’s such a delicious combination of comfort and drama, watching paint dry and people fall apart. Remember the Huf Haus back in 2004; that mad castle in Skipton; the ski chalet in the French alps with the builder called Monsieur Bastard? Epic televisual feasts, all of them. Babies come, children grow up and go, marriages fail, ill health hits…. Whole empires can rise and fall in the time it takes one eccentric, deluded self-builder to construct a six-thousand square foot eco hobbit hole from used tyres and original 16th century lime plaster, having re-mortgaged four times. The budget always spirals, the schedule always stretches, the basement always floods and the glass NEVER arrives from Antwerp on time. The surety and satisfaction of shit hitting the fan, when you know that fan was bespoke, made by an artisan blacksmith, and cost five grand.

Topped and tailed with the sage eloquence of Kevin McCloud, Grand Designs is all I could want in a TV show. I would pay Kevin to follow me round and comment on my life, to give it heft and perspective – when I’d had a particularly good editing day, he’d be leaning against the doorframe of our kitchen: ‘Battling prevarication and lashings of self-doubt, this project has inevitably extended beyond its deadlines, but ultimately Morrey has produced an elegant construction, its clean lines and simple composition nonetheless revealing work of exceptional depth. It’s a testament to her original vision and creative endeavour, and I, for one, am profoundly moved by it.’

Anyway, this latest episode is an absolute corker and you should check it out. We’re in a south-west London cemetery (we’re not told exactly where, though I suspect Kev offered us a visual gag, riding his Brompton bike through it), with former army captain Justin Maxwell Stuart, one of the poshest people on the planet. His ancestral seat is a castle on the Scottish borders – poshos are always a bit Scottish – and that represents everything he thinks a ‘house’ should be. An Englishman’s home is his castle – literally, in this case. In fact, the family fortress is rather ramshackle and looks like it could do with a lick of paint – maybe they’ll do a sequel where Captain Stuart does up the old Stuart pile. Yes, it’s those Stuarts, as in the Queen of Scots – the building features an escape tunnel she used. Maybe he could do it up as a subterranean bar, complete with a blue plaque. I am so here for that show.

But I digress. Maxwell-Stuart, descendent of Mary, has bought a derelict keeper’s lodge for £1.8 million, and intends to spend a further £1.6 million doing it all up. The lodge is listed, there’s a toilet block next door that he will demolish to make way for a mega-extension, featuring a mega-basement, mega-moat, mega-swimming pool, and possibly a few mega-murder holes to defend himself from passing plebeians visiting the adjoining cemetery. Oh, that reminds me: there are a load of dead bodies, courtesy of the graveyard, which Captain Stuart is understandably keen to avoid unearthing. That would just be a lot of red tape, not to mention barricade tape. So that’s the set-up. I don’t know about you, but I’M IN.

How will he pay for all this, you may be wondering? Well, like a lot of aristos, old Justin Maxwell-Money-Stuart is absolutely loaded. He’d tell you he’s cash-poor, but boy, is he asset-rich. ‘You can’t just sell the family silver,’ he says. But at least he’s got it, and anyway he doesn’t need to. He’s got houses everywhere, no doubt a few bonds and shares to resort to if he needs to release some equity; maybe he could get a loan from the Queen or something, I don’t know. Justin worries about money, but not in the sense that normal people worry about money. Anyway, if things really went tits up, he could perhaps consider taking his eight-year-old son out of BOARDING SCHOOL and sending him to the local comp? Justin is a genial enough bloke, but there’s part of me that wants to splatter him with boiling oil.

Now obviously, £1.6 million isn’t enough to sort out all this shit-hit fan, the budget corkscrews like a demented Catherine Wheel, and Justin has to spend the GDP of a small country making sure he gets the chainmail waterfall for his pool. Initially, I’d wondered why his ‘wonderful’ ex-wife divorced him, but by the end of it all I was simply hoping she got her fair share of that family silver, before he spaffed it on his state-of-the-art wine cellar.

Justin’s wife may have done a runner, but it doesn’t matter because by the end of the show he has a new partner in fine dining, though he appears to confuse her with a Labrador when he summons her to meet Kevin. They seem very happy together, and he’s delighted with his new pad, which McCloud describes as ‘stunning’ and, less gratifyingly, a ‘Playboy Manor’. I just hope that George, his son, will occasionally be allowed home from Harrow for a swim.

We can’t always get what we want in life. Hell, all I want at the moment is five minutes’ peace without one of the kids spilling orange juice on my laptop, and that seems like a fucking impossibility. Justin Maxwell-Stuart wanted to spend £3.4 million on his luxury lodge, and he ends up spending £4.5 million. You can’t have it all. Well, you can, but it will cost £1.1 million more than you envisaged. At a time when families are struggling with the financial and emotional impact of Covid, when people are losing their jobs, risking their lives in their jobs, when cancer patients are having their operations cancelled, and the entire country is relying on a vaccine rollout overseen by one of the worst governments in history, I wouldn’t have thought this would be the right show to air. But, somehow, it was. The ultimate escapism, via a beautifully renovated underground tunnel.

What can I say? Like Mary Queen of Scots, we’re living in crazy times.

• Grand Designs, Series 21, Episode 1 - Channel 4