This Old House host Kevin O’Connor appears on The Spark
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Scott LaMar
Airdate: March 08, 2023
This Old House has been one of the most popular TV shows on PBS since it premiered in 1979.
In the 44 years since then, a lot of other home makeover, fixer upper type shows and an entire network have sprung up but none quite like This Old House.
Kevin O’Connor has hosted This Old House for the past 20 years and he spoke with The Spark when he visited the Pennsylvania Home and Garden Show in Harrisburg last weekend.
O’Connor talked about why he thinks the show has been so successful,”It was truly reality television. And by that I mean not the definition that I think we hold today for much of what we are calling reality television back in 1979. The idea was, is to follow a jobsite and put a microphone on Master Carpenter, Norm Abraham and the other folks who were on the job site. Look at what they did and talk to real contractors and real homeowners about what they were up to. And so that authenticity that started in 79 continues today. We are doing real projects for real homeowners still. And my co-hosts, if you will, are all professional contractors. I’m the only person on the talent side who is not a professional contractor, Tommy Richard, Jan, Mark, they all run their own construction businesses. So we have authenticity and we also have trust. People know when they hear these gentlemen and these women speak that they’re talking from a place of experience because they and their fathers and sometimes their grandfathers have been in the trades. They live it and they breathe it every day. So those two things, I think, is what makes us unique. And I also think it’s what makes us successful.”
O’Connor described what has changed over the time he’s been hosting the show,”There are always esthetic trends for sure, and we’ve seen them some come and go. You know, the farmhouse modern came on like a storm. I think it’s fading right now. We have seen the mid-century modern trend that happened, you know, before my lifetime. But we’ve seen it put in place and and we’ve seen it sort of fall out of favor and now we’ve seen it back. I have definitely seen sort of all of those esthetics. But to me, the trends that are sort of the most interesting are the the changes in the way that construction actually happens. I don’t think people appreciate how many advances have actually happened within the construction industry. And by that I mean new materials, new products, new efficiencies. The magic behind your walls, that gray box in your basement that keeps you warm, those things are being improved all of the time. There are tasks that craftsmen used to do three or four or five different tasks that have now been compressed into one step because we have new materials. And those are the things that most homeowners don’t appreciate, but they’re actually going on behind the scenes. And it’s a credit to these people who do this professionally that they stay on top of that stuff. And if they adopt those and I think it’s one of the things that separates the really good builders from the medium builders and the poor builders.”
This Old House airs multiple times on WITF-TV, including Saturday mornings at 9:30.
