Daytime TV

And so begins the March Break, that week approaching spring that sees Pearson’s passenger numbers rise dramatically, parents scrambling to find childcare for a week and those lazy teachers claiming one week is just not enough. (It isn’t.)

For those of us who were lucky enough not to be sitting on the floor of Terminal 3 on Saturday, watching the snow fall and the flights fail to leave, we get the sinful indulgence of daytime TV.

Back in the day, daytime TV used to mean soap operas and game shows (I remember many a March Break spent as a student in my parents’ basement, shouting “Big Money!” at contestants on the Price Is Right as they spun that massive wheel just before Showcase Showdown). Later on, audiences saw an endless string of trashy talkshows with similar themes (My sister is pregnant with my transvestite husband’s baby etc.) and different straight-talking hosts (Montel, Sally Jesse, Maury etc.).

Nowadays our channel lineup has increased and so has the spectrum of daytime television. It seems that home-based shows have been all over the place for a while now: everything from home renovations to selling property to managing debt are the foci of shows.

And it seems we’re following Britain's lead, a country which, if the daytime lineup of BBC Canada is to be taken as a representation of television interest, is really into buying, renovating, decorating and selling property (and then rummaging through the attic to find things to sell).

Canada is even seeing the import of a few Brits to host Canadian-produced shows. Colin and Justin’s Home Heist premiered on HGTV back in October, transplanting the flamboyant duo from a variety of “flipping” shows in the UK (including Colin and Justin On The Estate, where they attempted to revitalize a dire council housing estate) to a show focusing on our national crisis of ugly basements.

The latest British import is Kim Woodburn who presented How Clean Is Your House?, a show revealing the grimy state of some UK households. This past Tuesday, Woodburn hosted the first episode of Kim’s Rude Awakenings, where she gets down to the dirty in Toronto homes.

How do homes get to this state, one wonders? Especially homes of those lazy teachers who have an entire week off to spring clean (which happens to be my goal for this week)?

Well, we get so drawn into the soap operas, game shows, talkshows and home and design shows that we can’t possibly find the time to do any work on our own houses.

(I should have left the dust, braved the airport, and gone to Cuba.)