Hero of the week, at the front of an exceptionally competitive field – the 22-year-old inauguration poet Amanda Gorman, the health workers who have been heroes for almost a year – has to be the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Not only did he voluntarily return to the country where he was almost killed by poisoning, but he marked his immediate arrest by getting his team to release the most politically devastating home makeover show of all time.
The unwilling recipient of his Kevin McCloud treatment was President Vladimir Putin, the man who conceivably had something to do with Navalny’s poisoning and imprisonment, who will be riled beyond measure by the film. It states that money skimmed from the purchase of medical equipment (among other sources) paid for a $1bn, 18,000 sq metre Italianate secret palace on a clifftop Black Sea estate several times the size of Monaco. Through the detailed use of satellite and drone footage, snaps by building workers and architectural drawings, the film brings to your screen the complex’s tsarist eagles, its underground ice-hockey rink, its purple pole-dancing venue, its private theatre, its room for toy car racing, its £40,000 side table with a built-in bar. As Lanfranco Cirillo, the palace’s hitherto obscure architect, has rightly said: “There is a big difference between an expensive home and a classy, elegant home.”
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