Banjo Beale: ‘I was bullied for being gay’

His Scotland’s Home of the Year — or plain SHOTY to its fans — commands some of the country’s biggest TV audiences while Designing the Hebrides was declared by one critic to be so lovely it would make viewers relocate their lives to the Scottish islands.
But Banjo Beale has not always basked in such popularity. Or even sought it.
The interior designer, now based on Mull, grew up in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales in the macho car-racing town of Bathurst. There he spent his Sundays rearranging the living-room furniture rather than visiting the track. Not all locals were impressed.
“The kids called me Freckle Face Fart Machine,” he reveals. “Come high school, I was bullied for being gay before I even knew what gay was. The names got more cruel.
“I was a chubby, freckle-faced child that didn’t like sport, toys or people so it was always going to be hard when it came to school.
“Add to that I lived on a car racing track in a small country town in the bush with a big family of tradesmen, opal miners and truck drivers. I retreated into my imagination as a child and kept company with imaginary characters and my only mate, a golden retriever dog called Daniel.”
Beale, now 37, says he would never have gone on television back home “where all those people who bullied me at school were watching and judging me”.
In Scotland, viewers like what they see. Beale is one of three judges on SHOTY. The show is a huge hit. It has been downloaded from BBC iPlayer a million times.
Designing the Hebrides — essentially escapist home make-overs set in some of Britain’s most stunning landscapes — also seems to have captured the public imagination.
Not least because it has a little drama. In one episode Beale brings in a team to fix up a bothy. It was, he says, a 50-minute walk from a ferry which had stopped running because “there was a storm, cyclone coming in”.
As usual he is up against a tight deadline to complete the project, with budget and tradesmen being limited. “I was calling in back-up from Ro [his husband Rohan Christopher] and a friend, who were drunk at a barbecue,” he says, adding with good-humoured exasperation that “they were absolutely no use” when they turned up.
Beale adds that while there were only three or four adults on screen, at one point 13 people were trying to fit inside the “tiny” bothy with a leaking roof on the island of Ulva. This included a film crew “up from London” expressing some anxiety about rain jackets not quite sufficient for a thorough Scottish drenching.
Far from any tension on screen being ramped-up for TV, he gives the impression it might have been toned-down. “You can sometimes see people off the edge,” says Beale more than once, meaning the cast are struggling to keep their emotions under control. He hints that if you watch him closely you can see when, at times, the show “was quite annoying to make”.
This impish candour may rattle PR officers (he berates himself for indiscretion regarding his next project — rescuing a “dilapidated place” near Mull) but it also explains his appeal on screen. The designer is not frightened to be himself, to share a little of his vulnerability, in front of the cameras.
In Designing the Hebrides, he talks of working in a Mull bar. That job, he says, reminded him that he felt like an outcast when he was young. His career has certainly taken some turns.
Beale’s real first name is Brendan but was dubbed Banjo by Ro when he worked in advertising (because, like the instrument, he was highly strung). He moved to Mull after Ro got his dream job making cheese on the island. Beale — feeling a “bit lost” — signed up for a show called Interior Design Masters. Not, he says, because he wanted to be on TV, but because this might be the big break he needed as a designer.
There was a problem. The programme was made in Brighton, 500 miles and a ferry ride from Mull. During filming, he reveals, he was forced to couch-surf. The gig launched his career. “Some people go on this show with the sole motivation of making a career on TV. That was not ever for me,” he says. “Then when the cameras rolled, I probably had a little twinkle in my eye and did not take it too seriously.”
Now he has such a following that tourists visit Mull to inspect the places they have watched him transform on television. There is the possibility of a mini-Banjo boom on the island. “It’s quite overwhelming on Mull, they come and they know where you live,” he says in his usual careful but chirpy tone. “Because of the way I am and because of my show, it is quite personal. I am quite an open book. People do feel they kind of know me.”
Not that it irritates him: everyone, he says, on a small island knows your business anyway.
Beale is keen to do right by Mull. He says: “It was a conscious decision for me not to do holiday cottages and short term accommodation because I am super conscious of already it is really hard for [local] people to find accommodation.
“Young people cannot buy homes. You do not want to contribute to the disintegration of local culture.”
Beale, meanwhile, has somehow found time to start writing a children’s book based on his old school nickname. He says: “Freckle Face Fart Machine is the story of a boy that realises his differences are his superpower. It follows a young freckle-faced Banjo around the world as he disarms villains and helps them realise, we all have a heart and we all fart.”