Stacey tidies up… but it’s the BBC schedules that need tidying up: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS discusses last night’s TV
Sort your life
Helping our teens
Where does all the money go? The BBC pours £1.87 billion a year into its television services, let alone the half a billion that goes on radio, and the better part of a quarter of a billion spent online.
And what we get in return is a primetime hour about cleaning a house. Sort Your Life (BBC1) sent Stacey Solomon, her husband Joe and some friends to a farm in Shropshire to clean up the mess.
Most people paying for a cleaner will think that anything over £15 an hour is too much… and £1.87 billion is definitely too much.
It’s almost impossible to think of a show with a lower budget than Sort Your Life Out – a statement we can make with confidence, because the BBC editors will have racked their brains to come up with something even cheaper and failed.
We might forgive the Beeb for hiring Stacey’s cleaning crew to plug a hole when the rest of the week’s diaries are bursting with tension. But every channel is full of more junk than the cupboards in that farmhouse.
Sort Your Life Out (BBC1) sent Stacey Solomon, her husband Joe and some friends to a farm in Shropshire to clear up the mess (File Photo)
Wednesday’s BBC2, for example, was a heavy repeat: old editions of Angela Scanlon’s Your Home Made Perfect and Inside The Factory with Gregg Wallace, then Silent Witness’ Emilia Fox investigating the murders of Jack the Ripper, and an episode of the news quiz Mock The Week from May 2021… very current.
If only Stacey could talk to BBC director general Tim Davie, lay out all the year’s TV junk on a warehouse floor and make him promise to get rid of half of it. “Tim,” she said coaxingly, “look at the many old pieces of Dragons’ Den you have. Is anyone actually watching it?’
These shows pile up like chipped mugs on a kitchen shelf. No one wants them, but it seems a shame to throw them away. Farmer Andy, wife Lianne and their three children had about 1,000 mugs, enough for a chain of cafes.
We’re all guilty, on a smaller scale, Stacey believes: ‘I bet everyone has forty or fifty mugs they don’t need. When will 40 people ever turn up and ask for a cup of tea? It’s not happening.’
The best approach to cleaning up is simply to be ruthless. In Stacey’s show it is always the children who find this easier. They are invited to throw away half of their old toys and throw them away without remorse or sentiment – while their parents look on in shock and plead, “You told us all your friends had one like that,” and, “I have three queued for hours at John Lewis. Christmas Eve to get that, it was the last one.”
Children are, of course, unsentimental animals. They live for the moment, which makes it easier for them to throw away anything that has outlived its usefulness – but much harder for them to understand how today’s reckless decisions can impact the rest of their lives.
Pictured: Jayliyah and Marie Gentles helping our teens. When the cameras repeatedly returned to Beacon Hill Academy in Dudley, and the same problems returned, we got a real sense of how heroically patient the teachers must be.
Behavioral specialist Marie Gentles continued to struggle with smart but impulsive 14-year-old Jayliyah Helping our teenagers (BBC2). When the cameras repeatedly returned to Beacon Hill Academy in Dudley and the same problems returned, we got a real sense of how heroically patient the teachers must be.
Marie blamed “educational trauma” caused by Covid and other issues. But parents were also traumatized. The mother of Oliver, a seventh-grader with autism, cried as she described how she was left alone when other schools decided they had had enough of her son.
Although Oliver was autistic, he responded sharply to his mother’s emotions and begged her not to cry. “That’s what mummies do,” she told him simply.