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How Clean is Your Conscience?
Say what you will about the classlessness of How Clean Is Your House?: my vague feelings of guilt at the schadenfreude I experience when watching it are completely offset by the fact that it somehow managed to spur me to be on my hands and knees at 1:30 AM scrubbing the bathroom baseboards and behind the toilet, which hadn't really been touched since I moved in. Well, when I moved in I had an injured ligament in my back and couldn't do that for a year or so, and after that, it was more a matter of looking at it, sighing, and saying "I'll do that tomorrow."
For those who have no idea what How Clean Is Your House? is, it's a British show in the vein of those organizing shows running on every channel where the hosts and a TV crew go into a completely trashed/messy/squalorous* home and clean it out and make it all nice and shiny and totally never address the mental, emotional, or physical problems that made the homeowner start to live like that, and pretend that they've changed the homeowner's entire life.
The twist for this show is that they concentrate on the cleaning part, instead of the organizing part, and go into houses and apartments that haven't been cleaned (as in dusted, washed, scrubbed, etc.) for years. They wander through the place, banging dust out of things and scraping grime and smelling everything with appropriate expressions of disgust, then get the homeowner and lecture him or her for a while, then the crew comes in and throws out 90% of the stuff that's accumulated - the places have the clutter problem, too, not just the grime problem - and then they have a cleaning crew come in and scrub everything from top to bottom while the hosts show the homeowner various tips and tricks for cleaning things. They also take samples from various surfaces in the home and send them to a lab to be cultured, then show the homeowner the huge accumulations of horrible types of bacteria that they've been harboring in their house, in an attempt to scare them straight. (I live for the ones that have Yersinia in them. It's never Yersinia pestis, the Black Plague bacillus, but a relative, but one day I'm sure they'll find plague. XD)
And in the later seasons of the show, they come back two weeks later to see if the homeowner has managed to keep it up. Some do, some don't - and I expect that those who know that a TV crew is coming to film them again in two weeks and still don't manage to keep the place clean that long have some serious problems that have not yet been addressed. The ones who do probably managed to fix their problems before the show came to film, and they just needed the help of a crew to get the massive job done.
OK, I've managed to type long enough that my cleaning-induced alertness is gone and I'm sleepy again, so I shall stop typing and go the hell to bed.
* If that's not a word, it should be.
For those who have no idea what How Clean Is Your House? is, it's a British show in the vein of those organizing shows running on every channel where the hosts and a TV crew go into a completely trashed/messy/squalorous* home and clean it out and make it all nice and shiny and totally never address the mental, emotional, or physical problems that made the homeowner start to live like that, and pretend that they've changed the homeowner's entire life.
The twist for this show is that they concentrate on the cleaning part, instead of the organizing part, and go into houses and apartments that haven't been cleaned (as in dusted, washed, scrubbed, etc.) for years. They wander through the place, banging dust out of things and scraping grime and smelling everything with appropriate expressions of disgust, then get the homeowner and lecture him or her for a while, then the crew comes in and throws out 90% of the stuff that's accumulated - the places have the clutter problem, too, not just the grime problem - and then they have a cleaning crew come in and scrub everything from top to bottom while the hosts show the homeowner various tips and tricks for cleaning things. They also take samples from various surfaces in the home and send them to a lab to be cultured, then show the homeowner the huge accumulations of horrible types of bacteria that they've been harboring in their house, in an attempt to scare them straight. (I live for the ones that have Yersinia in them. It's never Yersinia pestis, the Black Plague bacillus, but a relative, but one day I'm sure they'll find plague. XD)
And in the later seasons of the show, they come back two weeks later to see if the homeowner has managed to keep it up. Some do, some don't - and I expect that those who know that a TV crew is coming to film them again in two weeks and still don't manage to keep the place clean that long have some serious problems that have not yet been addressed. The ones who do probably managed to fix their problems before the show came to film, and they just needed the help of a crew to get the massive job done.
OK, I've managed to type long enough that my cleaning-induced alertness is gone and I'm sleepy again, so I shall stop typing and go the hell to bed.
* If that's not a word, it should be.