I CAUGHT my wife scrubbing furiously at the skirting boards in the bathroom the other day before she admitted: "It's all the fault of those women on How Clean Is Your House? (C4, Wednesday)."

Those women are, of course, the dreadfully direct "it's for your own good" Kim Woodburn and the whinier Aggie MacKenzie, who could remove most offending dirt with her tongue.

But just like Alvin Hall's murky dealings in debt for Your Money Or Your Life (BBC2, Tuesday, now on at the irritatingly early time of 7.30pm), you can't help enjoying the plight of people in a worse mess than the rest of us.

A lot worse, judging by this week's final episode involving the hardly houseproud Le Bas family from Brighton. One of the children actually had a chewing gum collection anchored firmly to a bedpost. "Do we have a hoover?" one of the youngsters asked her mother... and she didn't know, which gives you a clue to the last time the rooms were cleaned.

After moments like these, I find myself feverishly emptying the litter and sweet wrappers from hidey-holes in the car as dad's taxi waits outside a music studio. "What's that?" asked my youngest, observing a small, plastic bag stuffed with interesting coloured paper and seemed ill-prepared for the reply it was rubbish heading for the dustbin.

Thanks to Kim, who appears to be better at dirtbusting than dieting, and Aggie, my wife now wails regularly "I can't keep this house tidy" and leaves helpful hints for our children on Post-its attached to our hall mirror like "clean, clean, clean".

As our offspring rarely display much life until bedtime approaches, she might as well place the Post-its on their foreheads.

How Clean Is Your House? is likely to muck in with a new series, but the programme which first put the grit in our teeth was BBC1's Life Of Grime, starring some of the most disgusting people in Britain.

Not far behind is DIY SOS (BBC1, Thursday) which returned for a new series featuring the folk who start hitting things with hammers before realising they can't plaster.

I can say this as someone who's just ended up clutching a cast-iron gutter in one hand and a broken bracket in the other while at the top of a ladder.

Fortunately, things didn't come crashing down as they did in DIY SOS for RAF man Bernie, who'd gone off to the Gulf leaving wife Jenny with a cottage minus a ceiling and proper walls.

Watching presenter Nick Knowles & Co putting a post-wall Humpty Dumpty home back together again is heart-warming, but isn't this just encouraging even more of us to inflict DIY damage on a grand scale?

Those turning to TV for comfort are finding it increasingly difficult to sample new mainstream programmes thanks to soaped-up ITV schedules and the BBC's addiction to old comedy shows.

Having broken an agreement to reduce repeat showings, quote of the week must come from the BBC: "A repeat is not a repeat if someone hasn't seen that programme before." My reaction is unrepeatable.

Published: 12/07/2003