EVEN IF you had the fashion sense of Worzel Gummidge, smelt worse than a decaying corpse on CSI, had a singing voice like a warthog giving birth and the intelligence of a gnat, it would still be wrong for me to tell you that. But if I had my own television show, you’d not only have to take it, you’d probably agree with me, too. Anne Robinson, Gordon Ramsay and Trinny and Susannah must thank their lucky stars that so many people are willing to be harangued and humiliated on camera.
So must those grimebusters Kim Woodburn and Aggie Mackenzie. Having told people that they were living like pigs in How Clean is Your House?, they then told people that they actually were pigs in Too Posh to Wash. Since there are only so many stained toilet bowls and stinky bedding to which they can react with hammy horror, the pair were then whisked off to America to add some novelty. And last night, on How Clean are the F*lthy Fulfords? (Channel 4), they confronted Francis Fulford, “the foul-mouthed toff” from last year’s Cutting Edge documentary, The F***ing Fulfords, in which he struggled to maintain his Devon family pile while offering schoolboy gibes against everyone from gays to fat Germans.
Kim (the Valkyrie-dominatrix one) and Aggie (the Mrs Doubtfire one) weren’t here to clean up Fulford’s potty mouth. Instead they were tackling some key rooms in the Fulford mansion that his still long-suffering wife couldn’t hope to keep clean while her husband, unruly children and plate-licking pets ran amok. The voiceover observed lamely that chandeliers are “popular again”, but it was still hard to relate to clean-up tips for old tomes, huge wooden staircases and vast marble floors.
And despite finding a dead bat, Kim and Aggie weren’t confronted with the kind of hygiene horrors that tap into our childish delight in the gross; what we really like to see are homes so foul that you have to wipe your feet before you leave. To pad out the programme, a half-hearted makeover of Fulford was attempted. But his eldest son proved that blood is thicker than warm, soapy water: “When I take over the Great Fulford Estate, I don’t think I’ll keep it clean, but hopefully my wife will.” Is the British aristocracy so strapped for cash that it has to sell its dignity on television? I’ve just had to let the second under-gardener go, but I’m still not calling in the cameras.
Years ago, when we all knew our place thanks to drama such as Brideshead Revisited and To the Manor Born, television treated posh eccentrics with a gentle, Wodehousian humour. Nowadays they are cast as easy figures of fun. But who is having the last laugh? Having pocketed one fee for his Cutting Edge documentary, Fulford has now had a free spring-clean of his house — and he didn’t even swear that much. I bet he is already signing up for I ‘m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
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Last night’s Cutting Edge, The Black Widow, was a reminder of how much better Channel 4 is when making sensible documentaries. This was the gripping story of Dena Thompson, a dangerous fantasist preying on a succession of men in sleepy Sussex, who was belatedly convicted in 2003 for murdering her second husband (with a poisoned curry). She convinced her first husband that he was on a Mafia hit-list and he fled under a different identity (he took his lead from Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal). Her third spouse became aware of her psychotic nature only when she came at him with a baseball bat.
This story of bigamy and murder in suburbia could so easily have been treated salaciously or like a darker Ealing comedy — the programme was fond of such homely details as garden gnomes — but was always respectful to the victims and their relatives. What was lacking was any psychological insight. But then, like Francis Fulford’s reappearance on television, perhaps Thompson was simply motivated by the desire for money. Her third husband admitted that he didn’t suspect her even when she inquired if his waste-disposal unit could dispose of bones, I suddenly imagined Kim and Aggie in a serial killer’s room, fussing over nasty stains found behind the psychotic scribblings plastered over the bedroom walls. Grime Scene Investigation — it’s probably the only way to go to keep the Marigoldwielding duo’s fumigation franchise from becoming completely stale.