Banjo and Ro’s Grand Island Hotel, BBC1, Monday
This review originally covered Banjo and Ro's Grand Island Hotel when it first aired on BBC Scotland.
Among the gazillion gigs Alan Carr has signed up to this year, there is one very close to his heart and his time on The Celebrity Traitors - restoring a castle in Scotland. “All I want is a turret to call my own,” he said when Disney+ announced the imaginatively titled Castle Man in January.
At the other end of the “celebrities do DIY” scale is Banjo and Ro’s Grand Island Hotel. While Carr has the might of Disney on his side, Banjo and Ro’s show is more of a two-guys-and-a-dog affair.
Banjo is the genial judge from Scotland’s Home of the Year and the presenter of Designing the Hebrides. Ro is his husband, and the dog is a slinky charmer called Grampa.
Banjo and Ro are hoping to turn a derelict pile on the Hebridean island of Ulva into a boutique hotel using £150,000 of their own money. Grampa is probably hoping for something pungent to roll in.
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So let’s take stock. We have likeable hosts with some name recognition, tick. Plus characterful locals, a trailer-load of jeopardy, a dog, and a stunning location, location, location. It should be the perfect blend, but there’s no escaping that we’ve seen programmes like this many times before.
Our old friend jeopardy is piled on from the off. The building is listed and surveyors say the job will cost £2 million. The contract is for 25 years, and even then, Banjo and Ro won’t own the property. There is no heating, water or electrics and winter is coming. Plenty of reasons to walk away, but we suspect they won’t, not least because there are five more episodes to come (the whole series is on iPlayer now).
There’s a whole fuss about whether Anne, the chair of the charitable trust that runs Ulva on behalf of the locals (all 16 of them; used to be 800), will approve of the makeover. She, however, turns out to be a lovely woman and very supportive of the project, though she does hint that others might not feel the same.
For the moment, much rests on Banjo and Ro supplying the entertainment. Two laid-back Aussies, they have so far managed only mild disagreements. That's fine in the early stages, but here’s hoping for some meatier fall-outs between the practical Ro and the self-sty “chief imagination officer” Banjo.
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Adding to the list of positives are a nicely knowing narration by James Cosmo, and some clever production touches, such as showing the property as a computer-generated doll’s house, the front of which opens to show the progress within. Every home makeover show needs a gimmick, and that one makes a refreshing change from virtual-reality headsets.
They don’t have a Disney budget, but a lot of thought and care has gone into Banjo and Ro’s Grand Island Hotel. With a fair wind, and a UK-wide audience on iPlayer, they’ve as much chance of creating their own castle as Carr. Best of luck to them; they'll need it.
This review was originally published on January 6, 2026, when the programme first aired on BBC Scotland.
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