Combine the absurd with the vulgar*

Channel 4 have broadcast some riveting documentary-cum-car crash voyeurism shows in the past about people with OCD who can't stop cleaning and washing and who are paranoid about germs and mess. Gruesome but great fun to watch.

Channel 4 have also broadcast some riveting etc shows about people who are incapable of throwing anything away and live in a house full of junk and people who are never do any cleaning and live in a house full of filth. Gruesome etc.

I've often wondered why they don't merge the two concepts - cut out the middlemen they use to give these shows the veneer of respectability (psychiatrists, counsellors, professional cleaners/junk removers, blah blah) and just send obsessive compulsive cleaners round to the homes of the terminally messy.

Ta da... some of these clever TV people have had the same idea and Channel 4 now has a series based exactly on this concept called Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, on Mondays at 10 pm (first show yesterday, which I happened to watch).

The cleaners and the messies got on surprisingly well. The messies moaned and groaned but at the end they appeared to be quite grateful; the cleaners appeared to enjoy the challenge and I suppose it's much more satisfying spending a day cleaning away ten years' of filth and really seeing a difference that it is spending all day cleaning away one day's worth of non-existent and imaginary filth from their own pristine homes and having nothing to show for it.

My favourite character was the slightly Indian-looking lass who cheerfully admitted that she was probably addicted to the smell of bleach, and stood there scrubbing happily away at a filthy urinal while everybody else ran out of the building coughing with their eyes streaming.

* a line from "Some kinda love".