Mike and Angelo S12E4 (2000) - FULL EPISODE

Changing Rooms. Katy's pretentious hoity-toity interior-design-conscious cousin is coming to visit next week - that should give them just enough time to repair and do up the living room, following a bit of a mishap with a paint-filled balloon. No-one's got Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's number, but perhaps Tony Velucci off the telly will be willing to help. This episode was originally broadcast on Tuesday, 25th January, 2000. As always in the late era of the show, Tim Whitnall is an absolute force of nature and drives the whole thing with his manic energy, essentially playing four different personas in quick succession - Captain Catastrophe, Angelo, 'Tony', and the butler. That last one I didn't see coming at all, but it really helped to move the story on and set up the ending. For her part, Monica (played by Debora Weston, previously seen on the show in a different role back in S8E4) is also a brilliant character that I could completely imagine popping up in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous or something like that. I enjoyed Angelo's gadgets - one practical, one quite sci-fi - on which the plot hinges. The first raises the question of how long you can keep someone from noticing the house they are in is crumbling around them (as Katy attempts), while the second is a very clever concept that maybe could have been explored in its own dedicated episode. My one criticism is that maybe the bucket-related comeuppance could have been teed up and executed in a slightly less run-of-the-mill way, but overall I enjoyed it a lot. The fact that I've got this far without even mentioning Mike goes a long way to summing up what the show was by 2000 - by which I mean, he was no longer really the point of it. The breathlessly frantic farce is a long way from where we started in 1989, isn't it? Grateful thanks to Lee for sending me this recording. (If you're a copyright holder and have any objections, please feel free to contact me. Alternatively, I haven't monetised the video, so you're welcome to do so, and that way everybody wins.)