New Order!

The missus is convinced I have finally cracked. I am currently colonising an area of the back living room as a new office and she watched me move my bits in last night with my usual methodical precision: books in size order, everything on the desk at right angles, music to work to sorted in genre order, a Stalinist purge of everything in the area that is not mine so I can properly call the place home…

I call this orderly and organised, she calls it obsessive compulsive disorder and who’s to say who’s right. Well she seems to think it’s her normally… The missus does resist all my best attempts to bring order to the household by doing ‘helpful’ things, though, like putting all her CDs in alphabetical order and arranging her books into author order.

But some people are just never happy and, as I pointed out, the various families on Honey We’re Killing The Kids on BBC 1 would be only too glad of somebody like me to bring order into their lives. Sadly, though, the powers at the Beeb invited somebody else to do it…

The basic premise of Honey We’re Killing The Kids is that each week family ‘expert’ Kris Murrin and her team meet a troubled family and aim to improve and put some order into their lives in just three weeks.

Last week’s clan, the Jacksons, featured harangued mum Teresa, 11-year-old daughter Shannon and 10-year-old son Steffan, a five-a-day-cigarette man who started smoking when he was five. Yes. That’s right. Five! But as mum is a 60-a-day woman he’d still got quite a lot of catching up to do.

The best bit of the show is when the troubled parents (or parent in this case) face a computer-simulated image of their kids as they are now and their kids as they will be in 40 years time if things don’t change. And poor Teresa didn’t like what she saw one bit...

Her incredibly bright daughter had become a dumpier version of her mum with no hope in her eyes and the marks of an underachieving and hard life etched all over her face, while the boy looked like a walking cadever battery-fed on McDonalds for 30 years.

Fortunately it all worked out quite well in the end as the kids made an effort to change and so did the mum.

And the result… Well the freshly generated computer images of the kids growing up under their new regime made them resemble smugly contented members of the middle class rather than the grunts they’d previously looked like.

The show is without a doubt decent telly but it’s awfully voyeuristic in a car-crash sort of way and is a bit self-congratulatory. Fact: some parents can’t always indulge their kids with time and affection because they’re working long hours in low-paid jobs to put food on the table. But let’s not let reality intrude on reality telly.

And always remember if you need help: I’m cheaper than the BBC. Ask the missus…