I’ve seen some pointless programmes in my time, but Home for Life (BBC Two, Wednesday, 15 July, 8pm) may take some beating. In a time when everyone is flat-broke or worried about the future, it seems rather strange for the BBC to decide to show a programme that wills us on to spend money we just don’t have. Still, with a show like Kirstie’s Homemade Home, we got tips on how to tart up salvaged tables and all that, which makes sense. Love your home. You have to live in it. However, in this crappy runt of a programme, it simply stood by and watched people prove that money can’t buy taste.

Related: Kirstie’s Homemade Home

The show, hosted by two no-marks – one with a beard, one without a beard – cooed that people have let their homes get bland and identikit. Once upon a time, our homes showed “our heritage” and junk. Not where I grew up. Everyone I knew had stuff they didn’t mind getting smashed up by marauding, giddy kids, charging headlong into doors and having a game of football in the kitchen.

So this was an aspirational show aimed at young professionals with no children then? Not a chance. It featured two families tarting up their houses, leaving the children staring suspiciously at the new ‘statement’ pieces in the living room, wondering if they were allowed on the couch anymore. That’s it interior design mongs… demote children to the level of the house pooch.

Still, in one family’s case, I imagine the kids are hatching a plan to leave home entirely. A pharmacist and his wife from Sri Lanka made their house into something that looked like a remake of Jacob’s Ladder by Tim Burton.

One room contained a £25,000 poison cabinet and changing coloured lights, which gave the impression of being in an awful vodka bar in Stockholm. The fireplace they designed, inspired by a tsunami (yes, you read that right) looked like the fireplace from Beetlejuice. Their downstairs loo looked like the bogs in a tacky Indian restaurant (I’d name the one I’m talking about in Rusholme, Manchester but I don’t want my head getting kicked in).

Yet still, that wasn’t the most awful bit of footage. As soon as you entered the house, we were shown a ceiling that looked like an awful Rick Wakeman LP cover. It was a conceptual piece of art that featured a teardrop with a jewel in it and a warped world and and and…. AAAAAARGH! The horror… the horror…

The two presenters seemingly served no purpose at all. They wandered around and burped up the usual dross that TV home experts prattle on about. If they’d paid for the makeover, it would’ve made sense for them to be on-hand… but they didn’t. All these hideous monstrosities were paid for by the people participating, cajoled on by two men with no discernible use, taste or talent.

To get through this show, I needed fifteen packets of Settler’s Tums. It was dreadful. Absolutely dreadful.