Call the Cleaners review: More than the typical reality TV exploitation

‘Cleaner’ is an inadequate word for what they have to do. To approach a toilet pan that has been disabled through a buildup of caked-on limestone is something that takes real physical courage

(ITV)

There is nothing I enjoy more than watching other people work. I don’t think it is so unusual, and I don’t mind owning up to it. It is why I enjoyed Call the Cleaners, which has just ended its second run. I don’t know what they get paid, I imagine not much, but they certainly earn their money. I hope ITV gave them a suitably generous fee on top.

“Cleaner” is an inadequate word for what they have to do. This isn’t some home help popping in for an hour a week to turn the dishwasher on, spray some Mr Sheen on the sideboard and run a feather duster around the dado rails. Dear me, no. These are two-person squads who spend days at a time deep-cleaning joints that have evolved through a process of organic decay from homes into hovels. To approach a toilet pan that has been disabled through a buildup of caked-on limestone is something that takes real physical courage; what the occupant did in the circumstances wasn’t elaborated upon. Just as well.

There is a lot of it about, according to the ITV voiceover – another 1 million middle-aged folk living alone in the past decade, an increase in loneliness and perhaps mental illness, with mild forms leading to hoarding and self-neglect. It is one of those low-key social evils that rarely gets much attention, and that is why Call the Cleaners is a bit more than just the usual reality TV exploitation. “Don’t judge” is the motto and one the viewer is convinced to agree with.

There are reasons for people falling into squalor, and you soon see how the cleaners, all dedicated and sensitive to their clients, are actually social workers, even amateur psychologists, as much as workers armed with industrial cleaning apparatus. Some of their subjects have learning difficulties and, for one reason or another, just find domestic chores overwhelm them. Others become depressed and isolated through the death of a loved one.

That, for example, is what happened to Alan, whose accumulation of rubbish left him living in one part of one room in his flat, a filthy bed surrounded by ashtrays with a six-inch high pile of fag-ends, thousands of them, in itself quite a feat of engineering achievement. All the case studies – and there were worse even than this – were a standing, stinking rebuttal to Quentin Crisp’s often quoted and admittedly witty remark: “There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”

Er, yes it does.

Poor Alan – and it is right to feel sorry for anyone who falls into such a predicament – lost his wife eight years ago, and he is hopeless without her. Quite brave too, to allow stranger into his home, including an ITV film crew, exposing this monument of mess to public gaze and horror.

The pornographic aspects were there – the maggots, a strange liquid in a tin that had once been ham, a carpet that needed a paint scraper on it before it could be tackled with a vacuum cleaner. And the cleaners did him proud, restored his accommodation to be fit for human habitation, and gave Alan a new lease of life.

So his cleaners, Steve and Jamie, who bore the responsibility for rebuilding lives admirably well, have in effect rescued Alan from homelessness. The final touch was a thorough fumigation of all the rooms with a scented disinfectant. A sweet story, then, and told well.