Channel four's new offering How Clean Is Your Home? has the promise of being really quite compulsive viewing. Like A Life of Grime, it can simultaneously nauseate you, and comfort you that your mess is trivial.
As the commercial break opened, I noted that the first ad was for Dyson. Luckily, I had my Dyson handy, and during the break I Dysoned the hall floor and half the staircase. In subsequent breaks, including those in ER, the entire staircase, including the bits at the side and the angle between riser and tread, were thoroughly vacuumed.
A psychologist would say I was susceptible to advertising.
Did you know that housework burns off 200 calories an hour? Isn't that brilliant exercise?
Many many many many years ago when I was nowt but a nipper*, I lived in Southend. It was boring. I spent my Sunday evenings listening to the Network Chart, sponsored by an instant coffee manufacturer. Every time the jingle played, I felt the urge to go the kitchen and make myself a coffee. But it wasn't Nescafe.
So an advertising-type-person would call me a nightmare. Ask me what was advertised during those commercial breaks, I don't know...I was Dysoning.
I really don't like the sponsor sequences that act as parentheses to ER. Here we are, Carter, Weaver, Gallant, Chen, Abby and the rest wrestling with gut-wrenchingly emotional crises. Then, abruptly, it's interruped by a bunch of Saps and their pathetic Volvo WD40s.
Of course, back in those days, I should have made more use of those Sunday afternoons by going for walks along the estuary shore and into the hills. I was once driven through Burnham-on-Crouch and Maldon on the way to a quiz night in Chelmsford. I thought they were nice, but never returned.
*well, about twenty-two, actually
