How the hell is Grand Designs still this good?

Any show this old should be showing its age, and yet ...

Grand Designs, the British TV show featuring the calming tones, arched eyebrows and multiple jackets of host Kevin McCloud, first started airing in 1999.

That same year, Napster went live, Spongebob Squarepants debuted and Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France.

That’s freaking ages ago!

Since then, Grand Designs has aired 204 episodes over 20 seasons of building banter, DIY disasters, concrete confusion, plank problems and foundation fissures.

Sometimes there’s a pretty nice home to gasp over at the end. Sometimes.

While reaching nowhere near the longevity of the original, Chris Moller’s Kiwi version Grand Designs NZ is into its sixth season of impressively good long-form storytelling, and has become something of a local TV mainstay along the way.

Both of these shows, by any TV metric, are getting long in the tooth. They should be slowing down, creaking a bit, getting a few wrinkles, showing their age.

So how the hell are both of them still so freaking good?

I’m not a builder. I would struggle to nail two pieces of wood together coherently. I own zero power tools. I can’t sand, or plane, a god-damned thing.

Basically, I don’t care. About architecture. Or renovations. Or building my own home. I never have, and never will, want to do any of it. I just don’t understand.

And yet, over the past several weeks, I have mainlined the latest seasons of the UK and NZ versions of this show like Saul Goodman sculling water after several dehydrated days dragging duffel bags full of cash through the desert.

It helps that some of these episodes have offered scintillating viewing.

In one recent episode of UK Grand Designs, a guy in a wheelchair was building the accessible home of his dreams until the whole thing stressed out his wife and she left him. She stayed on to project manage it, but he was left rattling around in his giant dream home all on his own.

It was sad!

In another, a dude who made all his money selling electronic music compilations in the ‘90s lost it all on building his dream home - a clifftop mansion incorporating a lighthouse and a million-dollar driveway. He never finished it. It nearly bankrupted him. And his wife left him too.

It was super sad!

Then there’s the New Zealand version, which, over the first two episodes of season six, saw an extremely wealthy couple buy the stunningly expansive top floor of the old Farmers Trading Building then ruin it by turning it into the kind of place they could use to show off all their money to their mates. In other words, it was hideous.

And in the second, a Piha couple poured all of their savings into a modern bach with a huge deck and infinity pool that, halfway through the build, they realised they couldn’t afford. They did go on to finish it, but you could see the strain of it all etched into their faces.

Was it worth it all? In Grand Designs, it rarely seems to be.

I shouldn’t like this show. There are zero robots, for starters. But at the core of each episode is some deeply impressive journalism. Because Grand Designs is not an easy show to make. These are stories told not over days or months, but years, sometimes longer.

In that lighthouse episode, the owner's young kids seen squabbling at the start of the episode are fully grown women by the end of the episode. A full 10 years passes. That takes some commitment to storytelling.

To turn up and capture all of the moments that make those episodes what they are requires serious planning. It’s impressive. The longest story I ever worked on took me eight months, and by the end I was thoroughly sick of it.

I can’t imagine working on something for a decade. I don’t have the attention span. But I sure appreciate it when someone else does, and if nothing else, Grand Designs shows commitment to its craft. And to dressing Kevin McCloud in as many jackets as possible.

• Both versions of Grand Designs are available to stream via ThreeNow.