How Clean Is Your House?

This show is not judgemental. Period. It's simply Kim and Aggie going into completely FILTHY homes and educating the inhabitants in cleanliness. These people, although seemingly very nice, are utter, disease and bacteria growing slobs. I knew there were people in this world who are hoarders and those that don't like to clean. I don't know anyone who likes to clean, but come on. I had no idea so many people live in pig sties. With babies even!

I love this show because I used to think I was a bad housekeeper. No, I'm just disorganized. And if Aggie ran a swab over my kitchen counter she would *not* find fecal streptococci. Ewww.

I also like the fact that Kim and Aggie, for all the camp of the show truly do understand people who are this dirty have an underlying problem or problems and are quite kind to them. Good cleaning tips anyone can do for "cheap and cheerful" as they say.

Each week the Dirt Detective Aggie MacKenzie and the Clean Queen Kim Woodburn visit a house that has been nominated by the resident's family/friends in order to inspect it. The go through rooms, drawers, down behind things and around the person themselves and look for signs of poor hygiene or a lack of cleaning, tackling the dirt with gusto and trying to force the subject to see the error of their ways and clean their home.

British television has learnt a lot from a couple of programmes – Big Brother and Weakest Link to name two. The things producers learnt from these and similar shows is that: a) the British public like seeing real people and gossiping about them, and b) they like looking down on others at the same time. Hence we have a raft of programmes that allow us to sit in our homes and scoff at others while thinking 'well, I'm better than them' to comfort ourselves. This programme is yet another in that vein, where people desperate for TV exposure allow themselves to be inspected for the sort of hygiene that would make a tramp blush. How on earth anyone could be so desperate or shameless to show such inexcusable squalor in return for 25 minutes of fame is beyond me.

This series made 'stars' out of yet more c-grade celebs in the shape of the clucking and judgemental Aggie & Kim. Like all these shows, the hosts have to be over the top and harsh in order to make the grade and it should be enough to say that Aggie & Kim only intent to humiliate and react rather than help or educate. They do that well enough and the series was successful because people would watch it for something to talk about the next day at work. It is all a bit demeaning for the subjects and the audience if you ask me and, unlike Wife Swap for example, it has no basis in being about to spin itself as helpful or useful – it is just cruel and holds the subjects up to public ridicule under the pretence of helping them.

Overall this sort of programme has an audience and I'm rarely part of it. It is cheap television that is cruel and judgemental but both those things allow it to get talked about in offices by people who laugh down their sleeves at the subjects and comfort themselves that, no matter how they are living, they are better people that those they see on TV – as if that is any yard stick by which to judge your life.

I love this show but I don't think I've ever seen an entire episode because every time they give a cleaning tip I have to jump up and try it, and every time they show someone dusting under the bed or around the ceiling I go running for my Swiffer.

Seriously, though, what I really like about this show is that the homeowners are involved in the cleaning process and are shown how to clean properly, and then are given information about the nasty little bugs and germs that they've been living with due to their sheer laziness, and have you ever noticed that a good percentage of the homeowners are suffering from respiratory ailments that are easily cured or mitigated by nothing more complicated than a weekly dose of housecleaning? I also appreciate that the homeowners are not rewarded for their laziness and filthy living habits, as they are in similar American versions of this show, with new furniture and the services of a professional interior designer; all these people ever get is what they had to begin with, only cleaner.

I would love for this or any "clean-up" show to go back not two weeks later, but one year later, to see if anything they were told sunk in and if they did indeed change their way of life. Unfortunately I fear that with some of these people it's a little bit more than just not wanting to clean or not knowing how to clean; that there are underlying psychological problems that are not, and really cannot be addressed.

I know more than a few people here in the good ole US-of-A who could benefit from a visit from Kim and Aggie, but you'll have to excuse me now, because I just noticed a crumb on the floor that needs to be dealt with.

"How Clean is your House?" lets us look at some of the filthiest houses in Britain - and the boneheads inside them who haven't bothered to keep them clean. This is essentially a humiliation for the people who live in the filthy houses presented every week, and a warning to people who also live in houses as filthy as the ones we see - be warned, you could be nationally humiliated...

Though it is fun to watch, full of disgusting imagery and information (crusty brown donuts around the toilet bowl, anyone?) and Kim and Aggie's constant changing of many characters, this show is so damn predictable that you feel insulted. Every episode - you know how it's going to end - Kim and Aggie are going to clean the house up and "they all lived happily ever after". Nobody featured on the show seems to rebel against Kim and Aggie - could this all be a studio-filmed, pre-written never-ending series with actors? This is what ruins "How Clean is your House?" so much, and is also the reason why it will never get a DVD release.

On the whole, this show never passes on the gross-outs and general disorder, though there really is little else on offer. It would be much better if it had a variety of different outcomes - could we have some people who will never change, or people who drive K&A out of their house? 5/10

This show isn't for everyone; there are, for the most part, endings to the episodes that will seem similar to others. In fact, most endings are the same. But the show is a rarity--two interesting ladies who, from week to week, go into interesting situations and make things right. It need not get any more complex than that. Kim and Aggie are smart, pretty and funny and their personalities come through nicely. In short, it's 30 minutes that the whole family can safely watch that won't insult anyone's intelligence. If you're in search of something in a more dramatic and amusing genre, try Monk. Otherwise, this is as good as a lot of TV gets.