The latest reality show format on BBC3 is perhaps the strangest ever. It’s called Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife, and for the life of me I can’t work out whether the subject under the microscope is Anthea Turner or the two non-Antheas in each episode.
Quick recap if – for some unaccountable reason – you missed the show on Sunday night. Anthea Turner shows off how tidy and obsessively systematic her vast house is. There are two non-Antheas who are not so tidy and systematic. Anthea patronises the non-Antheas until they conform to higher standards of Antheaness. Alternatively, the non-Antheas rebel at the iron rule of Anthea, and Anthea acts pained.
I should say here that Anthea’s presumed house is not merely tidy, it is beyond tidy. It is like a showhouse without the reckless devilry, or a army base furnished by The White Company. Nothing is out of place. To keep it that way, surely she must have several maids, each of them more obsessive-compulsive than the last (perhaps she has). She has white canvas boxes in her wardrobe, with neat labels on them (Mac & umbrella, for instance). She suggests that women should keep their shoes in clear plastic boxes so that you can see what shoes are in each box. To which my response is, people keep shoes in boxes? Not just on the floor of the wardrobe?
There are two possible readings of this show. First, that BBC3 believe that Anthea Turner is, in fact, some sort of perfect housewife, and that the rest of us would benefit from her advice, particularly filtered through her ghastly patronising of the two non-Antheas. This seems unlikely for a channel that produces Little Britain and Two Pints of Lager. If there were (God forbid) a Good Housekeeping channel, it would naturally be the most likely explanation.
The second theory, made more plausible by the jaunty 50s-era graphics that accompany the show, it that it is a study of Anthea Turner, Woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She is holding her life together with System, but only just. She tries to spread the word, but there is resistance. People do not understand. They think her house is – gasp! – in some way sterile. Presumably, the non-Antheas will quietly rebel from week to week, and Anthea will get more and more pained by their wilful blindness in the face of System. Perhaps there will be a couple of particularly recalcitrant non-Antheas in the penultimate week. Then, in the final show, Anthea’s alabaster facade will crack, and we’ll see her running round the house giggling uncontrollably, and wiping faeces all over those white canvas boxes, while muttering snatches of Lady Macbeth.
And I, for one, will be watching. Compulsive viewing.