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.
