BEVAN ON THE BOX
NATHAN BEVAN CASTS A CRITICAL EYE OVER THE WEEK’S TV
IT’S ironic that, thanks to the influx of programmes over recent years devoted to curing people of their hoarding problems, our TV schedules are as cluttered as a septuagenarian kleptomaniac’s understairs cupboard.
Get Your House In Order, Britain’s Biggest Hoarders and The Hoarder Next Door are just some of the shows which have offered a peek inside the rammed-to-the-rafters homes of the nation’s compulsive stockpiling fraternity.
From ceiling-to-floor tat to mounds of mildewed miscellany, the natural reaction of many would be to upend an entire crate of Febreeze into the leatherette sofa and run like hell for the back door.
Not the Declutter Divas on
Channel Five’s Hoarder: Landfill In My Living
Room, however.
Aka Allyson and Zoe, these bleached blonde serial sorters wade neck deep into the quagmire of stuff that should have been chucked skip-ward yonks ago as though contestants on a terrible conveyor belt round of The Generation Game – “Handbag with a broken clasp, rusted cheese grater, busted teas maid, cuddly toy... dead rat.”
And there was more than one mummified rodent being pulled from the detritus round Susan’s – a cancer sufferer from Kent who’d been too afraid to even venture upstairs in her own gaff for almost a decade lest she get stuck.
She hadn’t even gone to the loo indoors for years, spending most days out of the house altogether, mooching round cafes to perform her ablutions.
We know this because, when the throne in the bathroom was finally uncovered the water in the U-bend was black and there was a long deceased rodent bobbing about in it.
Still, Susan looked like Mrs Hinch compared to John Gray from Huddersfield, or Jake Jonathan Zebedee MangleWurzle as he prefers to be known after proclaiming himself King of the Eccentrics many moons – and at least one nervous breakdown – ago.
He is quite the character with his flame hair, bottle bottom glasses and bird’s nest beard. Jake also wore a bandana across his forehead – an item we later learned was to disguise a rather prominent facial tattoo which read: “Up theirs.” Up whose? Well, up anybody that disagrees with how Jake MangleWurzel chooses to live his life, basically.
Essentially squatting at the side of a playing field in his caravan, Jake revealed that his adjacent former home had been razed to the ground over the years in a series of fires. Could that have had anything to do with the fact he slept on a mattress surrounded by piles of yellowing, crisp-dry newspapers and liked nothing better than a cigarette nightcap? Who knows.
That said, Jake did also admit to storing bottles of his own urine around the property – although it wasn’t made clear if this was for the purpose of extinguishing potential blazes.
Still, why spend a few quid on a proper smoke detector when you can spend a penny in a plastic flagon, eh? ■ THE interview round on The Apprentice is always toecurling viewing. Interrogator Claude Littner is to verbal nicety what a body cavity search at a Turkish prison is to Reiki therapy, and watching him tear apart the final contestants like warm naan bread on rugby club night, always makes me feel so much better about myself.