Homes must be clean enough to be healthy, dirty enough to be happy!
AGGIE MacKenzie is telling me about her lockdown love life. ‘I spent the first part of it with a man actually,’ she says. ‘Last March we’d been seeing each other for a few months and decided we either had to leap in together or just spend time completely apart so I thought, ‘‘Oh well, why not?’’
‘And we did and it was fine, but then for whatever reason I pulled back a little bit. It’s a terrible term but I’m very independent. I like my own space.’
At 65 years old, MacKenzie, who was devastated when she and her husband Matthew Goulcher split in 2010, knows a thing or two about space.
For almost a decade as one half of TV’s original cleaning couple Kim and Aggie she invaded people’s houses up and down the country, wiping judgmental rubber-gloved fingers along dusty surfaces and prescribing vinegar and old-fashioned elbow grease for mucky windows in their hit show How Clean Is Your House?
Stern and schoolmistressy, she came across as the sort of woman not to be crossed, particularly if you hadn’t steam-cleaned your curtains for a while.
But the MacKenzie who greets me via video call is rather a different prospect, a fact she bolsters when she reveals – oh, the joys of Zoom – that she is conducting the interview from her London home in knickers and a T-shirt.
‘It’s boiling here today and I had my yoga gear on, and then I thought, ‘‘Well, nobody’s seeing me so I’ll strip them off,’’’ she explains.
Gosh. While the Zoom screen does not allow for confirmation of this startling information, what can be seen of MacKenzie looks fabulous.
Lean, toned and tanned, her blonde locks down to her shoulders as opposed to the more severe short hairdo she sported onscreen, she appears more chilled-out yoga bunny than matronly TV cleaner.
MUCH of that is down to the fact that these days MacKenzie is, actually, a yoga bunny. Not only does she practise every day, but in 2017 she qualified to teach and spent much of lockdown – when not indulging in romance – instructing daily classes over Zoom to a handful of devoted students.
‘When I got to 50 I thought, ‘‘Sh**, I’d better start doing some exercise because otherwise I’m going to come to a full stop’’,’ she says. ‘And then I thought, ‘‘What do old people do? Yoga. Maybe I’ll do that.’’’
A weekly class turned into twice weekly, and then, during a quiet work period, she started going every day, and a friend suggested that she train to teach.
‘I thought, “Yeah, that’s a good idea actually,”’ she says.
Once qualified, she started holding classes at her home at weekends, and when lockdown hit, she switched to Zoom. It has changed her whole life.
‘It means I feel better at 65 than I ever have done, it’s brilliant. I just feel great.
‘Of course, now I’ve said that, I’ll probably get run over by a bus but I feel great, I’m fitter than I’ve ever been, it’s super.
‘I feel very glad that I discovered it when I did. It’s just part of my life. If I didn’t do yoga now it would be like not cleaning my teeth. I’d just feel weird.’
Has this new, chilled-out MacKenzie chucked in the housework too, I wonder, or is her house still clean as a new pin?
‘It’s pretty clean,’ she says. ‘It’s easy when you live on your own. But I’m sure if Kim was to come in here she’d be like, “What about this, that or the next thing”.’
Ah yes, Kim Woodburn, the glammed-up battle-axe with whom MacKenzie shared a screen for years before a monumental row during a panto run in Brighton which culminated in MacKenzie accusing Woodburn of pushing her.
Although the pair limped on through another series of How Clean Is Your House?, they haven’t spoken since the show ended.
Would Woodburn really get an invite to her home?
MacKenzie pulls a horrified face and shakes her head vociferously. ‘Well a) she wouldn’t want to come, and b) she wouldn’t be getting an invitation,’ she says firmly.
But while they clearly haven’t made up, MacKenzie – who even went through therapy to deal with her difficult relationship with Woodburn – says that she has finally made peace with it all.
‘What can I say about it? It was such a weird time. She is a very complex person. I mean, everyone’s complex but Kim is super-complex.’
MacKenzie was a happily married mother of two working as head of the Good Housekeeping Institute when Channel 4 came calling, asking her to screen test for a new TV show about cleaning.
She paired with Woodburn and the show was an instant hit, a new type of reality programme that regularly pulled in more than five million viewers a week and even aired on BBC America, earning them a spot on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
‘After the first show we were asked to go on the Graham Norton Show and then it was Jonathan Ross, Oprah Winfrey... I sort of felt I was in a bit of a daze. I thought, “This is nice”, but also like I was looking in on myself.
‘I remember being driven down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and looking at these big billboards with us on the front of them and thinking, “This is a bit surreal”.
‘I should have kept a diary really, but I was so busy.’
Despite the success of the show however, behind the scenes the situation was tense. Woodburn was allegedly nicknamed Kim Kong by production and MacKenzie says that everyone on set would tread on eggshells in order to keep her calm.
‘She’s not a happy person, and very difficult to work with,’ says MacKenzie. ‘And I’m not the only one to say that.’
The row between the two happened in 2008 while they were playing the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella in Brighton. MacKenzie claims Woodburn pushed her ‘really, really hard’ and MacKenzie responded by calling her ‘ugly on the inside’.
Woodburn later said of the incident: ‘I am unclear where these false allegations have come from, but I wish her all the luck in the world.’
BOTH have clearly moved on – Woodburn to further reality TV fame, including an explosive stint on Celebrity Big Brother in 2017, and MacKenzie to her yoga. She still keeps her hand in cleaning-wise, including a recent book on the myriad uses of vinegar and a website, Aggie’s Tips, but says she finds the more recent cleaning trends baffling.
She is somewhat bemused by the social media army of ‘cleanfluencers’ – women such as Instagrammer Mrs Hinch – who use their substantial platforms to dispense cleaning tips in short videos.
‘It’s kind of weird,’ she says. ‘I think it’s all a bit mad. I couldn’t be bothered, to be honest. I’m quite lazy that way. Or rather, it’s not what I want to be doing. I’d much rather have real conversations.
‘I can’t be on my phone or having my head in the computer all the time. It feels a bit manic. Anyway, Kim and I were the originals.’
Instead she keeps busy with her yoga classes, including – restrictions
How TV doyenne of housework found a new mantra (and a new lover) in lockdown... and turned her passion for yoga into an internet hit
– a yoga retreat to Italy later this summer which she will lead.
‘I don’t really have that many people in my classes,’ she says.
‘It would be nice to have more. I’m really bad at marketing myself and selling myself. I always think – and this sounds arrogant – that people should come to me. It’s that thing of wanting to be found but not being willing to shout about it.’
Is it a Scottish thing, perhaps? ‘I think it might be, actupermitting ally,’ she says. ‘You don’t blow your own trumpet. You don’t market yourself, and you don’t brazenly go out looking.’ MacKenzie grew up in Rothiemurchus, near the Highland town of Aviemore, something she says prepared her for the huge levels of fame she received while filming the show.
‘Because I come from a wee village near Aviemore where everyone knew everyone else, it was kind of like going back to that, except that everyone knew my name, and I didn’t know theirs.
‘I felt very comfortable with it. It made me feel at home.’
IT was MacKenzie’s early years in Rothiemurchus – and specifically her mother – which gave her the background in cleaning that propelled her to such heights, although she reckons she couldn’t live like that herself.
‘She was a nightmare actually,’ she says of her mother, pulling a face.
‘There were four girls and we lived in this council house which was quite small, and she was an absolute targer.
‘I think it was partly that thing of people coming in and out of the house and the thought of the house being messy and someone seeing that, it was beyond what she could cope with.
‘So everything had to be tidy, and I do think she was a bit over the top. I’ve got this little mantra now that a home needs to be clean enough to be healthy but dirty enough to be happy.’
Still, with MacKenzie’s pedigree, do her friends not hire in the professional cleaners before they have her round to dinner?
‘I always tell them I’m not here to look in your corners, I’m here to eat your food and drink your drink, so let’s sit down and have a good chinwag.
‘That said, if I go to someone’s loo and there’s a bathroom cabinet, I can’t resist the urge to open the doors and see what’s in there. I’m terribly nosey, it’s awful.’
No surprise then, that she likes her own privacy.
While the lockdown boyfriend is still on the scene, they no longer live together.
‘We’re very different people, he and I,’ she says. ‘We still see each other but it’s much less intense than it was.’
I wonder if this need for space and independence is something that happened in the wake of her 2010 divorce.
‘Actually, it’s probably part of the reason why I am divorced,’ she says.
‘I just really like not having to check anything with anyone,’ she says. ‘I think that’s what I really love about being on my own. I don’t have to consult or negotiate or argue, I just do as I like.
‘I come and go as I like, eat and drink as much or as little as I like, and I can spend my money how I like. I really enjoy that.’
At 65, it seems that MacKenzie has finally earned the freedom – from her marriage, her upbringing and even from Woodburn – that she’s always craved.
She spins the camera around to show me a collection of glass bottles in all the colours of the rainbow sitting on a high shelf.
‘I think there’s some dust up there,’ she says. ‘In fact, I know there is.
‘If I was my mother I’d be getting up there on my stepladder, taking everything down and washing it through.
‘But that can wait for another week, can’t it?’