Cleaning up our lives

TV Review: Corporeal virgins don't emanate from the TV woodwork very often, so Ann Widdecombe is a rare and anachronistic breed. Since dyeing her hair blonde and jogging around our sets in Celebrity Fit Club, she has given up her designs on the leadership of Britain's Conservative Party and ascended to the status of television personality.

Not a woman to cross hockey sticks with, her latest incarnation is as a stern and uncompromising agony aunt, beetling around Britain in a pair of green wellies, dragging her troubled clients back from emotional precipices like a determined St Bernard in a wig.

In the second part of Ann Widdecombe to the Rescue, she was on a mission to save a marriage that was crumbling as scarily as a digestive biscuit. "Give me the hills of Dartmoor any day," Widdecombe grumbled as she marched across a flat suburban park in country-style combats to nab Dean, a sadly optimistic fishing enthusiast, as he cast his rod into a duck-pond. Dean's wife, Alison, in a swirling fit of the vapours, had volunteered her problematic marriage to Widdecombe and the great viewing public to solve.

Alison, it seemed, didn't think she was being taken seriously enough by Dean; she felt undermined by his laissez-faire attitude to life, though personally I'd be more concerned about his self-deluding choice of fishing venue (supermarket trolley and chips, anyone?).

Widdecombe sat the unhappy couple on their leatherette sofa to talk some sense into them. Easygoing Dean was looking a little uneasy by now (but maybe that's because he'd had to give up on his carp); until this point, it seemed to have escaped him that his wife was a little ball of fury.

"Do you think," Widdecombe asked a teary Alison, "that you may be just a tiny little bit over-sensitive?" There was a pause as Alison's eyes gathered moisture like a thirsty plant, and then she bawled: "I am. I am very sensitive." In the end, the couple agreed to talk to one another once a week (after dinner on a Sunday, in case you're even remotely interested).

"Communication, communication, communication - how many times have I said this?" chanted Widdecombe like a Yiddisher mamma, as she reclined in her car on the way to salvage some other bland domestic wreckage.

Widdecombe's appeal is that she seems genuinely committed to the task in hand. Being completely devoid of any sense of irony, she threw herself unquestioningly into the challenge of sorting out other people's problems, and when dealing with a very unhappy teenage girl, Shannon, who had lost her mother to cancer and her father to a new wife and infant, seemed truly moved and interested in the girl's plight.

Like bread-and-butter pudding or a rousing gymkhana, Widdecombe has the makings of a quintessentially British institution: her no-nonsense approach, reassuring presence and bulldog persistence may just be, in these days of uncertainty, exactly what the British public wants to watch.

IT'S BEEN SAID many times before, but the Irish chat show just hasn't been the same since Gaybo hung up his mike. Pat Kenny always seems to be skating the thin ice of panic, and one suspects that sooner or later, in his desperation to appear relaxed, he'll implode and little bits of his bionic interior will litter the floor of studio four. On the evidence of the first of her new series, Saturday Night With Miriam, relaxation isn't Miriam O'Callaghan's problem. Political journalism, however, appears to be a more natural habitat for her skills, although this probably has far more to do with the interviewees than the interviewer.

Her guests were a fairly uninspiring bunch. DJ Carey, Cecelia Ahern and Paul Brady are perfectly pleasant, well-pressed and talented individuals; combined, however, they had all the spark of a wet barbecue. Sitting in plastic chairs that looked as if they'd been salvaged from an airport makeover show, on a set that appeared to be covered in tin foil, their assorted knees shyly nudging each other, they chatted amicably to O'Callaghan about romantic fiction and childhood and someone called Peggy who won four camogie medals. They politely avoided discussing any potentially murky areas of their private lives, such as marriage breakdown, single parenthood, money or sex. O'Callaghan looked vaguely relieved when it was all over. She wasn't the only one. It will be interesting to see if the stubbornly distracting summer can throw up some livelier company for her over the next five weeks.

CLEANLINESS, OR THE lack of it, dominated the midweek schedules, with Kim and Aggie sticking their heads down other people's toilets in yet another series of How Clean is Your House?. This was preceded on the same evening by Undercover Hospital Cleaner, a predictably depressing documentary from the Panorama team. Three hundred thousand people in Britain catch an infection in hospital each year, 5,000 of them die, and MRSA, the headline-grabbing superbug, is still rampant. Taking her life in her hands, journalist Shabnam Grewal got a job as a cleaner in Birmingham's Heartlands Hospital, which had contracted out its cleaning to a large hygiene company whose procedures, rules and codes of practice all looked sparklingly efficient on paper.

In reality, Grewal found herself working with under-resourced cleaning staff who were earning, on average, £4.85 (€7) an hour. "Peanuts," said tattooed Steven, who worked a seven-day week and used the same mops and cloths for toilets, floors and basins. "You do what you can quickly, then get out."

There was blurry footage of the rooms of tuberculosis patients being perfunctorily cleaned with a baby wipe, and throughout the programme microbiologists warned of the devastating implications of cross-contamination.

The real crime here, however, seems to be the way the weary, despondent workers are treated like a band of epsilons and deltas while working on the frontline of the fight against deadly infection.

Habib, for example, worked in outpatients; to make ends meet, he did two shifts back-to-back each day, effectively working a 72-hour week.

Unsurprisingly, he was disengaged and lazy, indolently sweeping up some of the four kilograms of dead skin each of us lose in a year, pilfering sandwiches from the nurses' fridge, drinking water from a glass and returning it unwashed to the cupboard in the ward kitchen. His work ethic is lousy, but it is difficult to blame him for cutting corners, even though some, albeit few, of his colleagues, do adhere to the rules and procedures. Someone is making a decent living from our used tissues and misfortune, and it certainly isn't Habib. Both he and Steven were suspended when their bosses were shown some clips from the programme prior to transmission. The investigation continues next week.

IN CUTTING EDGE: The House Clearers, we met Brent and Gail, owners of Clampitts, an antique-cum-junk-shop in Prestatyn, north Wales. Brent had been a miner until the pits closed; then, unemployed and broke, he won £18,000 in the Irish Lotto. He and Gail bought their extraordinary corner shop and began the task of clearing the houses of the dead, depressed and destitute to stock it.

The programme was beautifully shot: the crisply unforgiving wintry streets around Prestatyn; the shyly unoccupied houses of the recently departed, victims of hypothermia or dementia; the grieving relatives avoiding their own avarice; the quilt-jacketed Sotheby's valuer happily telling Brent that his entire stock was "NSV" (of no saleable value); and the warm-hearted, chain-smoking, platinum-blonde Gail, who movingly described a childhood of misery and violence at the hands of her father. Brent and Gail shifted through the debris of other people's lives, looking for that one piece that would make them millionaires, while behind them, in the wet sky, power-generating windmills whirled like accelerated metronomes.

The couple were doggedly yet implausibly determined to be as rich as their friend, Ron, also an antique dealer, whose house was an Aladdin's cave of priceless clocks, his cabinets stuffed with objets d'art. Ron, an elderly and gargantuan diabetic, was unwell when filming began, and died during the making of the documentary. Ron had always told Gail, who was at his bedside when he died, that eventually his house and its contents would be left to her. After his evocatively filmed wake, however (china cups and fruit tarts in aspic), his powdery-cheeked sister-in-law, Maud, whom everyone mistook for his wife, told us otherwise.

In preparation for Ron's funeral, Gail was having her streaks done. "Do you have a morbid fascination?" asked her bulky Welsh stylist, whose very blue eyes were barely contained by their sockets.

"Oh yes," said Gail, grinning from highlight to highlight, "I am morbid." Then, much to the quivering delight of her hairdresser, she went on to describe how once, when Brent had gone to a house to collect a sofa on which a man had died, Brent was knocked out by the stench, as most of the deceased was still in occupation. "His intestines," said Gail with relish, "were still inside it." Gail and Brent don't need to search the pockets of the dead for their fortune; they just need to sell the film rights to their life story.