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Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – Nine things we learned when he spoke to Rylan Clark about How to Be a Man

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has been a beloved TV star ever since his first appearance on home makeover show Changing Rooms in 1996. With his leather trousers and Musketeer hair, he was the antithesis of that era’s “lad culture”. On this episode of How to Be a Man, Rylan finds out what masculinity means to a man who has never bothered himself with following rules. Laurence tells Rylan about the history of masculinity, why his wife is the best husband in the world, and why there’s nothing effeminate about leather trousers. Here are nine things we learned…

Listen to their conversation here

1. He doesn’t care what people think

When Laurence first appeared on TV, he was well aware of what people were saying about him. “I can remember a very early press assassination attempt calling me a ‘flamboyant heterosexual’,” he says. “I absolutely adore the term and I think this is something I’m quite lucky about. I really don’t give a f**k what people say about me. When Changing Rooms started it was a huge explosion. It was overnight. There were a lot of very confused people because they just couldn’t understand what I was. I was so not 20th century. The 20th century was incredibly controlling. There was a real definition of… what was masculine, what was feminine. What was allowed, what was forbidden. If I was going to be on television I was going to be who I was.”

I was so not 20th century. The 20th century was incredibly controlling. There was a real definition of… what was masculine, what was feminine. What was allowed, what was forbidden. If I was going to be on television I was going to be who I was.
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen

2. He grew up without a father

Rylan asks Laurence about how he became the man he is. “My father died when I was nine and my mother was then diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis,” he says. “My childhood sounds like Dickens… but it was a very comfortable, straightforward existence.” He doesn’t remember anything of his father, but he suggests similarities. “He was a very eminent orthopaedic surgeon and I think he was a bit of a dandy. He always wore a bow tie… He said if he didn’t wear a bow tie then his tie would dangle in the wound.”

3. He's 'irritatingly optimistic' about the future

When Rylan asks Laurence about “toxic masculinity”, he says he’s more conscious of toxicity of all sorts. “We are moving into a phase where toxicity seems to be so much more prevalent,” he says. “I’m hoping that it’s the darkest hour before the dawn. I’m hoping that it’s the poison coming out of the wound. We all know exactly where it’s coming from. It’s from social media… Our bogeymen are becoming over-inflated.” He’s not doom-and-gloom about it though. He believes fearing the worst will bring about the worst, and vice versa. “The other problem is… making things to be worried about. Things to be frightened about. I am irritatingly optimistic.”

4. He feels sorry for bullies

Being resolutely himself has rarely caused any problems for Laurence, he says, “except for one moment in a pub in Dulwich [where] there’s a whole knot of skinheads in a corner… One of them starts absolutely laying into me… The thing was, I was wearing a rubber mac. It was literally like the Batcape. He was punching it and punching it and [nothing was hurting me]… I just started feeling terribly sorry for him. Eventually he gave up and we started talking about the fact I used to go out with his sister.”

5. His wife is the best husband in the world

Laurence says his wife, Jackie, would “say I’m very masculine. Like everything in my life, I have made up my own masculinity. My masculinity is my particular recipe.” He says the traditional gender rules don’t really apply in their marriage. “She sorts out the mortgage and the car insurance and I fart around and make sure the roses are in water.” Rylan says he’d love a husband like Jackie. “I’ve got the best husband in the world,” replies Laurence.

6. He’s fascinated by historical masculinity

When discussing what masculinity is, Laurence points out that a lot of current views on masculinity ignore history beyond the last 100 years. “Masculinity has always been a very moveable concept,” he says. “The 20th century tried to fix masculinity into being something very specific, which is why people wanted to react against it… Up until that point, masculinity was something that changed era by era. Georgian masculinity was a very different concept from Victorian masculinity… and Elizabethan masculinity. Just think about clothes. An absolute icon of the court of Elizabeth I, someone like the Earl of Essex, wore a lot of jewellery and a lot of lace and wore tights… The point is, at that time in history a lot of [things] we consider total femininity… were actually considered to be incredibly masculine.”

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen: 'Women much prefer men with nicer skin and much nicer attitudes'

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen talks to Rylan about the term 'metrosexual'.

7. He credits women for changes in male behaviour

If you were around in the 90s you probably remember the term “metrosexual”, which essentially meant a man who uses moisturiser and cares about his clothes. It’s a phrase Laurence remembers and he thinks its disappearance shows how masculinity changes. “It’s become the norm,” he says. “This is exactly the way the tide goes. These things become absorbed. It’s very much – as is so often the case with major social change – down to women. Women much prefer men with nicer skin and much nicer attitudes. Therefore they’re the ones exerting the right kind of social friction on their boyfriends, so it becomes assimilated into the norm.”

8. He loves to be disagreed with

Rylan and Laurence discuss how attitudes to art change and how something that was considered OK in centuries past might be considered unacceptable now. “I think there’s something a bit wrong about that, because then you’re not looking at the real art,” says Laurence. They discuss Rubens’s painting Rape of the Sabine Women, and Rylan points out that out of context Laurence’s approval of it may upset some people. That’s fine by Laurence. “I’d much prefer someone coming up to me in the street and saying, ‘I’ve just listened to that lovely Rylan podcast… and I must take exception to something you said.’ I’d love to have a conversation about it. This is all opinion.”

9. There’s nothing more manly than tight leather trousers

Laurence has always been famed for his clothing, which is generally colourful, extravagant and impeccably coordinated. It’s long been a mystery to him that he was ever considered anything other than a masculine dresser. “One of the things I was quite surprised about in the early days of Changing Rooms was this discussion of my wardrobe being effeminate,” he says. “What was effeminate about tight leather trousers and a big Mr Darcy blouse? That was literally a very masculine style [historically]!”

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