tortured by a grand redesign

Angela Pertusini on the show that is a very thorough homage to Grand Designs

Watching Build a New Life in the Country, you wonder whether it isn't a front for a sinister psychological experiment in which the hapless lab rats - in this case Terry and Marilyn, a middle-aged couple from Tyneside - are pushed to the very edge of sanity so that scientists can plot exactly where that crucial breaking point falls. Either that, or it may be a version of the Japanese game show Endurance, in which contestants undertook increasingly sadistic challenges for the entertainment of viewers.

The premise sounds innocent enough. Terry and Marilyn have sold their suburban home and bought a pile of rubble in the Northumbrian Pennines too wretched even to be dignified by the term ruin. Somehow they intend to renovate this sad stack of stones into a four-bedroom home, doing all the work themselves. While holding down full-time jobs. And living on site in a caravan that most closely resembles a pilchard tin. During one of the worst winters in 40 years.

Need I go on? The track to the house is impassable to lorries, so all their building materials must be dumped half a mile away and transported bit by bit to the site. Strict conservation guidelines mean, for example, that the original, spectacularly irregular roof slates must be reused, which would be fine except that Marilyn has to sort through 500 of them every time Terry needs to lay one and then haul the tombstone-sized bit of rock up to him. A storm washes away 16 tonnes of carefully transported and piled builders' sand. They have to mix and lay 15 tonnes of concrete in one day - in the snow. In true Geordie fashion, one of Terry's sons goes about this in a T-shirt.

This suffering would be almost, almost, worth it for the view of the valley, one of the most remote and unspoilt places in the Britain, but I'm not sure that pretty scenery can compensate for everything else.

"Winter usually starts [in September]," says one local farmer sagely. "But this year, July and August were very bad, too."

By the time the first rains and thuggish, caravan-warping winds hit, I would have been calling out for the fiendish camera crew from Tokyo and their bath of battery acid, but Terry and Marilyn claim to be loving every minute. "I've never been so happy in my life," Marilyn rhapsodises, sitting in newly roofed squalor, a fire sputtering feebly beside her.

I find their attitude utterly astonishing. Are they being brave for the cameras or have they simply lost their discomfort genes?

As a veteran of a couple of far punier renovations, I fail to understand how anyone, even the equity-obsessed British middle-classes, can enjoy this level of hardship. Maddeningly, the makers don't really press the couple on this; it's left to you to decide whether they are hoary-handed stoics or starry-eyed lunatics. I'm still making up my mind.

There's no getting away from the fact that this show is a very thorough homage to - if not a complete copy of - Grand Designs. I would be pushed to name one significant element that was different: the triumph over adversity; the breathtaking vision of the participants; even the presenter's hand-wringing chats to camera (although George Clarke does not begin to compare to that piece of bluestocking totty, Kevin McCloud).

But Grand Designs is a great programme, so why not produce a well-researched, nicely-filmed lookie-likie such as this one? With a television schedule often cluttered with unwatchable examples of neophilia and audiences turning in droves to the satellite re-run channels, I am beginning to feel that originality is a very over-rated virtue.

• 'Build a New Life in the Country', Thursday 9pm, Channel Five.

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