We must be right mugs to hang on to these mountains of clutter
LIt’s true. My mother has never thrown it away. It was made from yellowing stoneware, with a faded reproduction of a newspaper page printed on one side — and it was washed in the sink and dried after every cuppa.
These days, we’ve got a dishwasher. I don’t wash up, I just stack dirty crockery in the machine and forget about it. As a result, I need many more than one mug... I must have about 20.
The appliances that promised to make our lives simpler have, in fact, done the opposite. Washing machines mean we have far more clothes, fridges result in much bigger food bills. our homes have become overstuffed repositories for thousands of possessions that we forget we ever bought.
When presenter Stacey Solomon and her team turned up at a London home to help Tash and Lawrence Yaku, plus their four children, clear out the clutter, on Sort Your Life Out (BBC1), she counted 48 mugs in one kitchen cupboard.
That was just the start — with three removal vans waiting outside, she found 60 obsolete chargers, lions and chimps, infamous Joe Exotic.
Louis Theroux, who first visited the oklahoma animal collector ten years ago, was reviewing unseen footage in Shooting Joe Exotic (BBC2) — his fascination with this creepily cruel little man heightened by the global success of the Netflix documentary Tiger like the king. Parts of this 90-minute special were bogged down in legal disputes, with Louis unable to mask his irritation that many old interviewees — including Joe himself, now serving 22 years for plotting a murder — had signed exclusive TV contracts and were forbidden to talk to him.
But with persistence and persuasion he was able to get Joe’s nemesis, animal rights campaigner Carole Baskin, to talk about allegations that she murdered her husband Don and fed him to her own tigers.
And he tracked down Joe’s brother, Yarri Schreibvogel, who has never spoken publicly about his sibling before. It’s fair to say there’s not a lot of love lost there.
For anyone who lapped up Tiger king, Louis’s analysis was intriguing: he sees Joe as a demented cult leader, with big cats instead of disciples.
But he wasn’t happy with his interviews, feeling he ‘tiptoed around’ Joe. ‘It’s odd to see,’ Louis mused, ‘how much I seemed to somewhat like him.’