Mark Millar is on a crusade to clean up building trade with new show

But get him onto the subject of ‘White Van Man’ – often pejorative shorthand for shoddy builders and aggressive road hogs – and an uncharacteristic change comes over him. One minute we’re happily discussing the merits of curry versus turkey for Christmas lunch and then, quite suddenly, a cloud descends.

“Don’t get me started on White Van Man,” fumes the 59-year-old. “Their days are gone, and about time too because I don’t like that we’re all tarred with that brush.”

Indeed, Mark, whose new solo TV venture, Build Your Dream House In The Country, starts on Thursday night on Channel 5, is on a one-man crusade to clean up the reputation of his industry. Second-rate workmanship and exploitation, he insists, have no place in the modern building business.

“The days of a builder with his backside hanging out of his trousers, being all negative about your job, are gone.”

Easy to say for someone with 30 years’ building experience, who’s used to parachuting into a stranger’s home and transforming it in a matter of days, as Mark did for 17 years with presenter Nick Knowles and the DIY SOS team.

But it’s not so straightforward for the rest of us who have to put blind faith in builders we have spent months finding. With his infectious energy and positivity, Mark is trying to change the landscape and show that with some preparation and planning, no one should be at the mercy of ruthless, unprofessional tradespeople.

He is starting with this new TV series, which shows families how they can build their own home instead of spending a fortune on a standard property. There has been a boom in self-builds and the show features build budgets as low as £10,000.

“Building your own home means the possibility of either converting an existing building or doing an ambitious new build or extension in beautiful country locations you could otherwise not afford,” says Mark, who left his native Northern Ireland to escape the Troubles and worked in England as a carpenter in the late 1980s.

In the first episode, viewers will see the expert help food grower Lucy and her partner Mike, a chef, create a four-bed family home with solar panel energy in one-and-a-half acres of open countryside in Suffolk. It’s not a spoiler to reveal the build hits problems – where would a home makeover show be without them? – and Mark comes to the rescue.

“I loved doing this series because it’s about making people’s dreams come true,” continues Mark. “Building your own home is the ultimate realisation of people’s bravery, it’s a real adventure.”

It is also, however, not for the faint hearted. When Lucy and Mike’s £240,000 budget is depleted and the builders leave the site, it’s all hands on deck to get the timber-framed house completed.

They graft day and night to finish the roof, insulate the walls, build the kitchen and decorate every room themselves. Mark, of course, breaks out his tool kit and gets to work on the kitchen island.

“I was impressed by Mike and Lucy’s attitude, they worked ridiculously hard,” he says. “When Lucy had to wear a wrist splint because of the pain, I was getting seriously worried that they had taken on too much.”

Viewers see Mark return to the site tonight to find out if the couple achieved their bold vision and enjoy the house they dreamed of. In future episodes, he meets a yacht builder creating an ‘upside-down’ house in Cornwall and a couple – Payal and Steve – converting a dilapidated metal sheep barn into a luxury home with a rooftop terrace and hot tub.

“Payal and Steve are a perfect example of people who are living their dream,” explains Mark. “Steve was almost left paralysed by illness and when they lost out on a fifth house they wanted to buy on the open market, Payal bought a barn in a field.”

Not only, Mark says, is it with a sense of personal achievement that these homes are built, but also there are also huge financial and ecological incentives.

“One family goes to their limit spending £500,000 on building their own home, but once it’s finished they have a house that would cost at least £1,000,000 to buy.”

Given the cost-of-living crisis, the personal stories are likely to resonate with many frustrated would-be home owners who cannot get on the property ladder because they can’t raise a deposit.

Indeed, the recent hike in interest rates has made getting a mortgage more difficult than ever for many Britons. But, cautions Mark, there is also a lot of hard work involved.

“Many of the projects we featured did end up with people getting stuck in to save money,” explains Mark, who lives in a Grade-II listed cottage in Bristol, his home city for 30 years.

“But if you cannot do the physical work yourself, there are other ways you can save time and money. One example is running the budget, keeping spending under control and negotiating the initial building contracts.

“This can save you thousands of pounds later down the line. Another way is by project managing. Again this saves time and money, ensuring materials are on site on time, and tradespeople are booked in to coincide with the delivery of products.”

Mark is also keen to highlight the environmental benefits. “With energy bills so high, we need to stop our dependence on fossil fuels.

“The other massive advantage to an own-build is that you can design a passive house, for example, which means the whole place is heated by the human body warmth.

“There are so many technological advances, we need to radically rethink the way we build homes. People need natural light for their mental health, we don’t want to live in terraced boxes any more.”

Watching Mark bouncing around on site, enthusiastically engaging with the protagonists and speaking to camera at the same time as whittling a piece of salvaged oak into a magnificent kitchen centrepiece, it’s hard to believe he very nearly never graced out TV screens at all.

He was happily – and lucratively – working for a variety of clients, including in New York, in the 1990s when a friend at the BBC asked him to build some studio sets.

“He told me, ‘You’re a TV natural, do you want to go in front of the camera on a programme called DIY SOS?’” recalls Mark. “I just laughed at the thought of it. Me, this lad from Northern Ireland, on TV? I didn’t want to be an ego so I said, ‘Nah, I’m too busy with my own clients’ and that was that.”

Fast forward six years and DIY SOS was one of the most popular daytime TV programmes, reducing the nation to tears with amazing stories. It went on to receive a Bafta nomination, moved to a primetime evening slot and was part of Children in Need.

When Mark was asked a second time, he didn’t hesitate and joined as project manager – the one who has to work out how to fit weeks of work into just nine days.

“I have never worked on such amazing projects as those,” he says.

“At the end of every build, the entire team would be in tears because people aren’t working from their wallets, they’re working from their hearts.”

The show made stars of Knowles and Mark, who left in 2021 after 16 years to pursue other projects, including Build Your Dream Home. He learned an enormous amount during his time, chief among them the importance of a positive and professional attitude.

“I remember seeing inside the van of one of my first bosses,” recalls Mark. “It was spotless, with all the tools neatly stored away. He took that same fastidious approach onto the building site and he treated all customers and other tradesmen with respect.

“I went straight home and tidied out my van and I have been really strict about that ever since. If you see a builder with a scruffy, chaotic van, don’t employ them!”

He is also passionate about apprenticeships.

“It’s what got me started. We need people to stay in the profession and young people, including more women, to come into it.”

Born in Belfast, Mark was a national springboard diving champion growing up in Bangor and had aspirations to train as a chef.

Instead, he became an apprentice carpenter, moving to London four years later before settling in Bristol with his former wife and mother of his two grown-up daughters, Meghan and Scarlett.

Mark has just become a grandfather for the first time after Scarlett gave birth to baby Rapaella just before Christmas..

In his sixth decade, he may have stepped off the diving board but he is an avid wildwater swimmer, often in the coldest waters around the UK.

“I love the exhilaration of outdoor swimming – it sets me up for the day and makes me feel so alive and well,” he explains.

Mark is divorced from his second wife, Lara, who he married in 2019, and is coy about current relationships because he gets a lot of attention on social media.

A quck peak through his Instagram confirms as much… but a video of his bare buttocks marching across a secret beach into the sea don’t exactly help his cause!

“Wowsers! Was not expecting that to pop on my feed”, writes one female fan; “Cheeky. No video of you coming out,” quips another.

Mark is a naturally ebullient character with that Irish gift of the gab which melts hearts. So it’s ironic that he credits two women for ensuring he never gets too big for his builders’ boots.

“My daughters make sure I don’t turn into a TV lovey,” he chuckles.

But the television industry is not an easy one to crack; there is a lot of competition and Mark is, frankly, very good at what he does.

“I don’t know where it comes from, it’s certainly not what I ever, in my wildest dreams, imagined I’d be doing when I was older,” he smiles.

“But I am so happy that I found it. I love going to work every day.” White Van Man has better watch out!

• Build Your Dream Home In The Country starts Thursday at 8pm on Channel 5. Also streaming on My5