Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen says he has Changing Rooms 'PTSD'
The interior designer said he is too old to be frantically making furniture in people's front gardens as he caught up with old colleague Linda Barker.
What did you miss?
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has joked memories of Changing Rooms give him Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The interior designer and TV presenter found fame on the BBC DIY home-improvement show in the 90s which saw neighbours swap homes and re-decorate a room for each other in a day. Llewelyn-Bowen was a guest on This Morning where fellow Changing Rooms star Linda Barker was presenting a DIY segment on the show, live from a viewer's home.
Llewelyn-Bowen, 60, said he is now "too old" to be building furniture in people's front gardens.
What, how, and why?
Interior designer Barker was giving viewer Ann from Chesterfield's front room a make-over in just two hours. She showed viewers around and gave them an update on what the team were doing while Llewelyn-Bowen watched from the comfort of the studio sofa with hosts Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley.
Barker introduced a team of volunteers on the front lawn, tutors and students of interior design from the local college, saying: "They're giving us a really good hand. They're building flatpack [furniture], my worst nightmare!"
Llewelyn-Bowen said: "That is PTSD for me. I am way too old to be sitting in someone's front garden building stuff. These days I get other people to do it for me. I don't have sweaty people doing things like that for me anymore."
The TV presenter was on This Morning to promote his new Channel 4 series Outrageous Homes, in which he visits the homes of people who have chosen to go all out with their eccentric and themed decor.
Llewelyn-Bowen was known for his flamboyant and colourful designs when make-over people's homes on Chang Rooms, which was recently rebooted on Channel 4, presented by Llewelyn-Bowen and Davina McCall.
But the designer insisted: "This is the most wonderful thing in the world, after those years of television, at 60, I can now say that my house looks tame, next to these people. Yes, we live in this fantasy environment that expresses us, but compared to the absolute bravery of the Outrageous Homeowners who don't ever see the need to hold themselves back. We live with our children, we live with our grandchildren, so there is a background to family life. It's kind of a little bit mafia in many ways. But it is all about doing what you want to do. Our house is a Cotswold manor house, it's listed, but these are problems that you can surmount."
What else happened on This Morning?
Jill Halfpenny was also a guest on the to talk about her book on grief, A Life Reimagined: My Journey of Hope in the Midst of Loss. The EastEnders star lost her partner Matt Janes when he died aged 43 after suffering a sudden heart attack at the gym.
She revealed how her bereavement had led her to finally deal with her grief from losing her father, who died while playing football in 1979 when she was just four-years-old. Halfpenny said: "We [as a family] weren't sitting down with that and we went into survival mode and we went into, 'Come on, let's get on with it.' So we just became like a big family of doers. We were just busy and we were productive, and we got on with things so externally, everything looked really good. But I think internally we were all really struggling because sometimes you just really need to talk about how you feel."
The former Strictly Come Dancing champion revealed how when her partner died, she decided to go back and begin to grieve for her father at the same time. She said: "I just thought, this is awful, but this is my chance now. I'm cracked open. Raw. Let's go and do all the work that I hadn't done with my dad. And let's grieve them both together and let's see what I can learn from it. Let's see if it can in some ways set me free."
This Morning airs on weekdays from 10am on ITV1.
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