junk

So I was watching a programme about that new reality TV demon, the Hoarder – The Hoarder Next Door, it's called (Watch out! There could be one in your street!)

'The rat dropping has sent Tricia into a deep decline', says award-winning actress Olivia Colman on the voiceover (forget Tyrannosaur, this is her best work). Poor Tricia! There are worse things in store for her, as the ultimate horror is then turned up amidst her accumulation of Stuff – a dead rat! 'Do you hear them moving around sometimes?', asks the professional housecleaner who has just picked it up. What, dead rats? Tricia seems a little unstable, I grant you, but surely she isn't that far gone.

The trajectory is a simple one: she starts off with a fabulous mess and ends up – triumphantly - with a dull room in which, admittedly, you could now live, if you still felt like it. But it's all rather dispiriting, as if Tricia (a former Corrie actress, we are told) has just lost the most interesting thing about her. She could at least have kept the dead rat as a coaster (it was surprisingly flat). As it is she might as well sell the place, on another C4 programme, and start hoarding again somewhere else.

This is followed by an ad for an edition of Secret Millionaire 'with a twist'. Is the twist that someone wanders around a deprived area pretending to be a secret millionaire, and then reveals at the end that he or she hasn't got any money whatsoever – and as a matter of fact needs to borrow some, quite badly please, and why are you all crying?

We live in hope.