How Clean Is Your House? (C4): WITH Georgina Taylor's home, it was more How Dirty Is Your House?

The answer was very dirty indeed. The place was filthier than the top shelf in a newsagent's.

That Georgina is a professional cleaner made the sights and smells that greeted Kim and Aggie all the more surprising. They squealed and screamed in horror at the muck and grime, not to mention the four dead and decaying mice, they found under her roof.

Her excuse was that, after spending all day cleaning other people's houses, she didn't feel like housework when she got home.

That was all too apparent. The clean-up campaigners could hardly get through the door for the piles of rubbish littering every room.

"What's that on the wall? Looks like diarrhoea," said one, eyeing a suspicious brown stain. As for the smell, they compared it to the school lab when they're doing rotten eggs experiments.

A shocked Kim didn't hold back. This was the dirtiest house she'd ever encountered, she told Georgina. "How can you be a cleaner when your own home is so vile?" she asked. Even more alarming was Georgina's apparent willingness to have her mucky habits exposed to the nation.

Twenty-five boxes were filled with rubbish before the full horror of her grimy home could be revealed.

Applying a good deal of elbow grease brought the brown-stained stove up sparkling white. Things weren't so simple in the bathroom, where the stench from the spa bath was so dreadful that it made you glad they haven't invented TV sets that emit odours.

Swabs taken from dirty areas of the house were analysed by microbiologist Dr John Barker. They showed that the kitchen was literally lethal due to bacteria. What was in the pipework for the spa bath was unimaginable. Georgina had been bathing in, as Aggie delicately put it, "her own do-do". I pity anyone who happened to be watching while eating.

Kim and Aggie worked wonders. The bathroom scrubbed up pink, the kitchen looked as though preparing food there would no longer be an act of suicide, and two sofas were discovered under the mountains of rubbish. "I didn't know I had those," said a surprised Georgina.

The cleaners also found buried treasure during their clean-up - a total of £120 in coins and a stash of cheques adding up to £130.

The pair returned to Georgina's house 14 days later to see if she was keeping up the good work. Her identical tidy twin Heather, who lives across the road, had promised to keep an eye on her.

Most aspects of her housekeeping passed their inspection. The rubbish bin didn't. "It's wild in there," they declared after sniffing it.

Georgina said she couldn't smell anything.

"See a doctor and get your nose seen to," said Kim sternly.

Published: 13/11/2003