This Is My House: a Stacey Dooley-fronted guessing game that’s actually good

T here is a bit in Peep Show that feels pertinent to this week’s column: after dropping acid at a funeral, Super Hans calmly asks Jeremy: “Can you tell me, as a mate, someone who knows me really well … is the bottom half of me on fire?” What I am saying is: the new Stacey Dooley show, This Is My House (Wednesday, 9pm, BBC One), has contorted my brain so much I now doubt the nature of reality itself. Tell me, reader, as a mate, someone who knows me really well: is the bottom half of me on fire?

Here is what I surmise is the vague outline of This Is My House: four contestants compete for £1,000 by guiding Stacey Dooley around a house while saying: “This is my house.” The four competitors all take Stacey around the same house, which means three of them are lying about it being their house. This quickly becomes fascinating: in an attempt to win £1,000, bald-faced liars claim ownership of dogs, barns and sofas. They spool out off-the-cuff stories about the soft furnishings that also act as a snipe at the taste of the person whose actual house it is. They serve drinks to a man who is forbidden from speaking, then cheerfully tell Stacey it is their husband. Can you just tell me, as a mate, am I on fire? I won’t be mad at you or anything.

There is an extra layer of joy to be had here, in among all the lying, because – in a different house – four-to-five celebrity guessers are trying to work out, as you are, whose house it is. This really helps with the woozy feeling of unbalance: watching the first episode I was initially certain whose house it was, then I watched Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen think out loud about it, and then my guess was suddenly split. For an hour, I not only watched Stacey Dooley politely beam around an Ashford mansion in a big dog-walking coat with one increasingly frustrated homeowner and three imposters, I also watched LLB and Bill Bailey attempt with Emily Atack to solve the gameshow like a Poirot episode. If the whole bottom half of me isn’t on fire, is at least one leg?

I feel strange saying this, but: This Is My House is … pretty great. The base game underpinning the show taps into the visceral joy of po-faced adult board-game deceit. The savage backbiting demonstrated by each of the potential homeowners mashes together the exhilarating subterfuge of Would I Lie to You? with the reality TV talking head explainers of Below Deck. Having celebrities watch and guess wrongly from afar of course adds a Through the Keyhole element to the mix. The whole thing – four strangers disliking each other in a domestic British setting – has notes of a chaotic Come Dine With Me week.

I have never had as visceral a reaction to a TV show as I had to this one: I gasped, laughed aloud, and squirmed so much I had to cover my face. There is a bit in this week’s episode – where someone licks a sofa – that threatens to be one of the more important TV moments of 2021. I cannot believe this, I cannot believe I am saying it: a house-based machiavellian guessing game fronted by Stacey Dooley that seems more like a 30 Rock spoof than most 30 Rock spoofs is actually really good. Can you please just pour a bucket of sand on me from the pelvis down?