The legendary presenter has an absurd, vampy time noseying around wildly decorated houses in quite possibly the best property show ever. All hail the Llewelyn-Bowennaissance!

I am starting to feel sorry for Channel 4, because they are never going to make a property show I like, no matter how many times they try. This is simply because of the economic reality I live in – I don’t own property and I’m starting to think I never will, thanks woke – and that makes it grating and tedious to watch other people on TV build houses, or renovate houses, or Grand Design their houses. They tried with George Clarke, but I loathed him. They tried with Kevin McCloud and, while I like and fear Kevin, I hated anyone he ever interacted with on screen (“Heh, yeah: I’m going to do the barn myself” – go to work!). They did that show where Sarah Beeny lives in the countryside and I quite liked it as long as I didn’t think about it too much. But, fundamentally, I will always struggle to find interesting what someone did with their kitchen.

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, then, a final roll of the dice, who this week takes us around a series of outrageous homes in Outrageous Homes (20 June, 10pm, Channel 4). To qualify as an outrageous home you basically have to decorate in a way that when people come over they say this sentence out loud: “Wow, yeah – you’ve done a lot here, haven’t you?”, and every week we get six of them. Episode one takes us into a £5m mansion made in the eternal honour of Treasure Island; a western-themed garden made out of junk; a groovy homage to the 70s; a make-do-and-mend festival of colour; an almost but not totally mosaicked house; and a semi-frightening house turned aquarium. Llewelyn-Bowen goes to about 60% of these houses, lets a second unit deal with the rest, and has an enormous amount of fun just not really caring about it at all.

I, for one, welcome the Llewelyn-Bowennaissance. In the 90s we didn’t really know what to do with him – smooth model face, ruffled shirt cuffs, calling Shakespeare “the Bard”: has anyone like this existed before! – but watching him bully Handy Andy into ruining a succession of people’s living rooms was one of the best things on TV. Then he went low for a bit, did a lot of formats that started with the word Celebrity, grew a resplendent goatee and started posing with his hands really firmly on his hips. But what LLB does, like almost nobody alive, is have an absurd, vampy amount of fun on camera. His iconic “It’s Larry!” entrance from the reboot of Changing Rooms a couple of years ago is just a taste of what he brings to Outrageous Homes: the first line of voiceover in the series is “Hail, glorious people of the United Kingdom!” He describes the show as “a celebratory frolic” through the nation’s front rooms; he keeps making homeowners pose with him in absurd still situations while he throws to an ad break; he does a to-camera piece in a chip shop (why?) which starts with the pleasingly erratic sentence “Hobbies: discuss!”. When I was in Year 9 we had a few classes with a substitute teacher who was clearly in the midst of a mental lapse where he no longer cared at all about geography, and Llewelyn-Bowen is bringing a lot of that energy to the screen (that’s a compliment).

This series is a sometimes frustrating, ultimately illusory fantasy befitting the elusive chanteuse herself

When I was 12 I wrote Mariah Carey a fan letter. She had suffered a very public emotional breakdown (as worded by her team at the time) and I sought to reassure her that her legion of fans, known by the collective noun “Lambily”, had her back. I impressed upon her that the only reason her debut movie, Glitter, had engendered such censorious critical and public wrath was bad timing: it was slated for release the same week as the 9/11 attacks. One day, I insisted, the culture would catch up to her genius. I told her she could call me on my parent’s landline anytime outside school hours and, smearing on some Coca-Cola lip smacker, sealed the letter with a kiss.

Fast forward through the requisite adolescent rejection of girlhood and all its infantile associations, including Carey and her five-octave range, and it turns out I had remarkable foresight. The 90s and 2000s icons – Mariah, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton – have all re-entered the cultural conversation, and it’s a repentant one in which we’re saying, “Sorry for all the sexism!” Even Glitter went from being much-maligned to a considerable cringey, camp classic.

Pernice has been at the centre of a crisis about his alleged ‘threatening and abusive behaviour’, after a backlash from his former dance partners on the hit show

Arrivederci, then, Giovanni Pernice. The BBC have at last confirmed that the Strictly Come Dancing star won’t be part of the professional lineup for this year’s series.

It brings to an end a tumultuous period for the BBC’s ballroom blockbuster – all the more embarrassing because it’s not even been on air. The furore risked spilling into autumn’s landmark contest, which celebrates two decades of dance. Ultimately, the corporation had little choice but to part ways.