DIY SOS star Nick Knowles: ‘We are an incredibly generous, empathetic society’

It is raining sideways in north Wales when Nick Knowles joins our Zoom. He has just come off site at a DIY SOS Big Build, soaked, wind-blown and apologising for being late. There has been, he explains, a flooding problem that no one knew about until the heavens opened. Before they can hand the house back, they need to engineer the water out.

It is an oddly perfect way to meet him. Halfway between a landslip and a deadline.

“That’s the job,” he says. “We normally aim to do about a month’s work in a day.”

In the Christmas Special, shown on BBC One on 30 December, viewers see a different crisis. It takes the team – joined by members of Gladiators – to Beverley in East Yorkshire, to the Cherry Tree Community Centre. Before the pandemic it ran a busy youth club. When Covid hit, the building became a food pantry instead, now feeding more than 150 families a week.

The kids meet in the park under a gazebo. When it rains, they get wet. The Beverley episode gives them a new youth centre. A kitchen, a meeting space and a proper front door. Dozens of local tradespeople pile into the mud to give teenagers somewhere safe to be.

Knowles has been fronting DIY SOS for 26 years. He is not the sort of presenter who sets a task then disappears while the real work happens.

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“People think that we turn up and, like other television programmes, you sit in a Winnebago and wait until you do your piece to camera,” he says. “It’s not how we work on DIY SOS. We’re literally feet on the ground in the job every day, all day.”

His role sits between two worlds. On one side, a primetime BBC One series that needs storylines and the emotional hit of the reveal. On the other, a live building site with up to 500 people working flat out.

The order of priorities is non-negotiable. “The most important thing is a family that are going through a really tough time. The second most important thing is the huge number of people who give up time at work, earning for their families, to come and do the building. The third most important thing is the TV programme being made.”

There is no script. Directors hang on for dear life as the week unfolds. Knowles calls it “controlled fly on the wall”. What has not changed, in his view, is people. And in 26 years, Knowles has met a lot of people.

“I don’t believe that people or their needs have changed at all. I think our perception of it has changed.”

He has seen the same pattern repeat in mid-Wales, big cities and tough housing estates in places like Stoke or Hull. Locals warn the team that no one will turn up, that the area is too rough. Then the vans arrive, the reason is explained and the suspicions fall away.

“Community and community spirit is sitting just below the surface, waiting for a catalyst,” he says. “People want to be sure they’re not being taken advantage of. Because we’ve been doing it 26 years, people go, ‘OK, I believe in that.’ We are an incredibly generous, incredibly empathetic society, much more than you would think reading the newspapers. It’s just that the divisive people in our society are the ones with megaphones.”

Read more:

• How youth centres can help thousands of young people unlock their potential and shine
• The accidental food bank: How youth clubs are becoming frontline services
• How youth charity OnSide gives a platform to the voices of the next generation

Part of his passion clearly comes from where he started. Knowles grew up on a council estate in Southall, West London, in a community he describes as “massively multicultural”. He bristles at the way working-class people are often presented on television, reduced to “Benefits Street”-style caricature.

“Council estates are full of people working hard, trying to get an opportunity to do things better for their kids,” he says.

 “For me, representing working-class heroes is a massive thing. That’s why DIY SOS is massively close to my heart, because how many programmes do you see on mainstream TV that are about working- class heroes?”

On a typical Big Build you might see a self-employed plasterer in a tracksuit sitting next to a waste-management boss in a sharp jacket, both wolfing down bacon rolls in the catering tent. It is, he says, “like Burning Man for builders. They all get on like a house on fire because they’ve all got one purpose and one direction to go in.” 

When someone asks if a finish is good enough, Knowles has a standard answer: “What would you put in your house? If it’s not good enough for your house, it’s not good enough for the people we’re building for.”

Across 26 years they have worked with about 28,000 builders and created something like £20 million worth of homes, respite centres and community spaces. Those experiences raise an obvious question: Why is this down to a BBC One show? Why are youth centres and disability services being held together by TV formats and volunteers rather than long-term funding?

Knowles’s careful answer steers clear of party politics and the show keeps politicians at arm’s length when they visit local builds. 

“If you see a person drowning, do you have a discussion about whose job it is to throw the life ring, or do you throw the life ring?” he says. “The answer is, you throw it and let somebody else talk about whether it should be done.”

But he is clear-eyed about what is missing. “Yes, there could be more carers. There could be more access to community centres for our young people. The community centres could be renovated to help young people, because that will keep them off the streets, and you will probably have less crime.”

He points to Grenfell. After the fire, when the team asked families what they wanted rebuilt, they were insistent about the boxing club that had been on the second floor of the tower. 

“Kids from all the different, diverse communities used to go to the boxing club, where they’d all learn to get on with each other, and where they would learn discipline and nutrition and respect for each other. That boxing club played a massive part in that area in terms of youth development.”

The problem, as Knowles sees it, is the mismatch between what people need and how politicians think. 

“If you have to win a popularity contest every four to five years, you’re probably not going to invest in something that will only come to fruition in the next term.” DIY SOS can move faster. “We can go, ‘That needs doing. We’ll build it. It will be done now.’ And we get to see the effect in two or three years’ time.”

For Knowles, it comes back to community and to storytelling. People stop him in the street to say that they love the show but cannot watch it without crying. That is not an accident.

“It is proper emotion, not looking for emotion,” he says. “But it has to be funny. If it was consistently emotional and heartbreaking, it would become just unbearable very quickly.”

So you get daft haircuts, in-jokes, builders ribbing each other. The laughter surrounds the hard stuff and makes it bearable.

“This isn’t a building programme,” he says. “This is a programme about the resilience of people, of what they’re going through, and then the empathy of people who don’t have much, but are prepared to set aside a week of earning for their own family in difficult times to come and help out somebody who’s in a worse position through no fault of their own.”

In Beverley, that empathy looks like a youth centre appearing from nowhere on a muddy field. After 26 years, Nick Knowles is still in the rain, still on site and still telling that story.

DIY SOS Gladiators Special was on BBC One, Tuesday 30 December, and is now available on iPlayer.

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