The idea behind the hit British TV series How Clean is your House? must have been very difficult to sell at that first brainstorming meeting. Imagine the scene. A group of TV executives gather round a table anxious to find the next big hit on the box. A little voice pipes up: 'What about making a series of six programmes where two middle-aged women go into really filthy houses and clean them with the owners watching? We will film the whole thing. It will be a real ratings grabber. What do you think?'
Yes! Really! That's the concept. It does not sound like the most exciting idea in the world for a TV programme. But the brains who thought it up were on the ball and the first series of How Clean is your House? was the surprise hit of the summer 2003 schedules, gluing viewers to their televisions with embarrassed delight.
A second series quickly followed and it quickly became one of those rare cult TV programmes that grab everyone's attention and become necessary viewing.
How Clean is your House? is a 30-minute show where two redoubtable cleaning experts, Aggie Mackenzie and Kim Woodburn, visit an over-the-top dirty home and then proceed to clean it up with the camera poking into every filthy corner - showing all the unsavoury evidence of years of filth and dirt. Kim and Aggie do not mince their words or hide their disgust as they wade through the piles of dirt.
Can this poking around in the filthiest homes in Britain be entertainment? It certainly is the way that Kim and Aggie do it.
Kim is tall, statuesque and perfectly groomed. She wears her blonde hair neatly scraped up on the top of her head and she is immaculately dressed. She looks as out of place in a dirty kitchen as a penguin does in the desert.