By Recommended Re-Viewing is a series in which we make the case for re-watching an old film or TV series which you can stream without leaving your house. It might be a plot that's so bad it's good, a scene which deserves more interrogation or a director's underrated gem.
Here, Esquire writer Tom Nicholson finds the darkness at the heart of mid-Noughties Britain, tucked behind a rancid fridge.
I don't know how it started. It might have autoplayed after that Changing Rooms clip with the teapot disaster. All I know is, I've watched a lot of How Clean Is Your House? on YouTube in the last four months. I've spent more time with Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie than anyone except my girlfriend.
From the opening sequence's operatic keyboard demo parp to Aggie admiring how modern a cathode ray TV the size of a barge looks, it's a blast of the most prosaic nostalgia. Even more evocative, though, is the bullying. HCIYH? is from a more overtly cruel time in British television.
I don't know about my girlfriend, but during lockdown I was suddenly constantly aware of how tiny and cluttered our rented flat is, and wanted to feel slightly less embarrassed about the state of it. The best bit of HCIYH? is obviously when the pair burst into some dirty bugger's house and howl at its filthiness. It's a moment of righteous indignation and pious huffing. It is cruel. It is delicious.
In one episode they head to Doncaster to visit Nooska Mullins, who's raising her son Connor by herself and wants to be a teacher. Her house is quite untidy, and definitely needs a clean, but you can see the floor at least. Kim and Aggie go through their full repertoire of pantomime screaming, harrumphing, oh-dearing, heaving and retching.
"This has got to be a living joke," says Kim, shortly after attacking a dusty lampshade with a dusty tennis racquet. "We're in a nightmare here."
"Oh god, it's so depressing," says Aggie. "A living hell."
Kim has to take a moment after sniffing a very old mug with a mystery liquid in it, which makes her gip and say something that sounds like: "Hwurp-I-beg-you-vomit".
She's seen enough. "Isn't this," Kim concludes, "an absolute garbage-hole?"
Kim and Aggie were at the vanguard of a load of TV personalities whose whole thing was to be unbelievably mean. Along with Simon Cowell, Anne Robinson, Supernanny Jo Frost and Gordon Ramsay, they made mid-Noughties Britain a country where no problem was too small and no contestant too meek for a public bollocking.
Kim and Aggie do try and make up for slagging Nooska off behind her back by sprinkling their explanations with 'my loves' and 'my dears', but everything comes from a very on-yer-bike, up-by-the-bootstraps perspective. That age of TV as corporal punishment of slackers, dolts and general ne'er-do-wells is clearly over.
Since The Jeremy Kyle Show's cancellation, and the tragic deaths of Love Island's Mike Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon, today's reality TV tends to at least pay lip service to the idea of mental good health. For many who featured on HCIYH?, a dirty home was an outward expression of their own unhappiness. Hoarders were literally being crushed by the weight of memories they couldn't bear to get rid of, but which they couldn't bring themselves to confront. They probably needed medical intervention; they got a pair of marigolds.
But there's another layer of empathy for people stuck in cramped homes. The long lockdown months weren't uniformly unpleasant for everyone; if you were sharing a couple of rooms with the rest of your family, say, you've had it a lot harder than someone with a shed and a patio.
That, in a roundabout way, is what HCIYH? showed us. The country's changed a lot in the last 15 years, and the past four months have forced us to look at the unfairness endemic in our society. Whether we've fully outgrown our instinct for pious huffing in the face of it is still to be seen.
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