Doing the dirty
Simon Hoggart
Makeover television shows divide into two groups, aspirational and contemptuous. Aspiring people want to look nice, or to have living-rooms that look nice, or to buy dream cottages or houses in Spain, France or Australia. They all shout, 'Look, this could be you, except that you're slumped motionless in front of the box with a tube of Pringles.' You never see aspirational shows for poor people, in which a toothy young woman bounces round the screen saying, 'The Entwhistles are looking for a place in Burnley, and I've found this bijou terrace house for only £2,000! It is in need of some modernisation — but the upside is, no problems with the neighbours. There isn't anyone else in the street!'
Contemptuous shows invite us to despise people, and of course that is more fun. Aggie MacKenzie and Kim Woodburn pioneered this in How Clean Is Your House?, though we should not forget the brief and lamented — by me — Dinner Parry Detectives, in which social experts poured scorn on poor blundering fools who had their friends round for a meal. Now Kim and Aggie are back with the supremely embarrassing Too Posh To Wash (Channel 4, Tuesdays). In this programme they don't clean houses, they scour people.
Their first victim was a young woman called °ski, who came from a moderately upper-class family — her grandfather was a peer, which doesn't mean a lot these days, but it did allow the intrusive, heavily jokey commentary to bang on about 'the nauseating nob', the 'dirty deb', and so forth. Osla, though living in a pleasant country house, and apparently with a large collection of friends who were either very forgiving or else had permanent colds, was very smelly. She never washed, never brushed her teeth and her underwear was so filthy that her bra, which we were told would normally contain about a thousand bacteria after a day's wear, harboured 80 million, enough to push her up at least one cup size without the use of silicone. In what I guess was a staged shot, we were supposed to watch through a secret camera as she picked her nose and placed the results in the pocket of her jeans.
The leaden commentary was annoying because Aggie and Kim now have enough confidence on the screen to let their own personalities do the work. 'Shall I introduce you to a bar of soap, Osla?' one asked, and the other advised, 'No, she'll probably go into shock.' A warning over the end credits said: 'Tips should be fol
lowed with caution. Are they worried someone might sue Channel 4 for making them too clean? Or using pumice stone to scrape away some vital organ? Like all contemptuous shows, the joy came from knowing that however odious you are yourself, you can never be as rank as the victim.
Betrayed By New Labour (Channel 4) was written and narrated by Greg Dyke, the former director-general of the BBC. It was his story, but it was taken over by Alastair Campbell, so that it became one of those biography programmes that strip away our preconceptions: Bligh was a fine humanitarian captain. the Few a bunch of lazy cowards, and so on. Campbell, it seems, was even worse than we thought.
The more we learn about him, the scarier he seems. Sir Peter Stothard, familiar in Downing Street's outer offices, described how Blair was 'cheerful and happy' when Campbell was present, 'but when he went out, he could be rather gloomy'. Dyke showed a few of the almost demented letters the Prime Minister's director of communications had sent him: 'It was an incessant whinge; it was just tedious in the end.' Campbell declared that 'BBC standards have been debased almost beyond belief' — for reporting a story that has turned out to be true in almost every essential. Gavyn Davies found Campbell 'a bit off the ranch', a phrase that is new to me, but which I think I can work out.
But if this whirling dervish of spin, this crazed, obsessive figure, took over the show from Dyke himself, there were other terrible walk-on characters. I suspect that Richard Ryder of the BBC governors will never live down that unutterably creepy shot of him saying after Hutton, with downcast eyes. 'I have no hesitation in apologising unreservedly for our errors.' He would have been right at home during the Cultural Revolution.
Monarch Of The Glen (BBC 1. Sundays) is back. The last time I inquired, it was the most successful of all BBC shows sold abroad. The principal characters — Richard Briers as Hector, Julian Fellowes as Kilwillie and that bloke who played Archie — have all left, in part because they couldn't stand spending six months of the year freezing through a Highlands summer. The plot this week was duller than usual, and spent far too long drifting around the fact that the bloke who played Archie appears to have buggered off for good. But none of that matters. Monarch would survive if the entire cast were murdered in an al-Qa'eda suicide attack; they'd just plonk another lot down by the lochside.
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