Ah, property shows, the mainstay of daytime television.  Smiley smiley Carol Smillie, Laurence Llewellyn Bowen and the ever-irritating Linda (that looks really really nice) Barker with the most grating voice I’ve EVER heard have a lot to answer for.  By the way, Linda Barker, it doesn’t look really really nice, it looks rubbish.

There are so many property shows it’s almost beyond belief, from the happily now defunct Changing Rooms to the hilarious 80s throwbacks of Homes Under the Hammer, To Buy or Not to Buy, Grand Designs, Property Ladder, The Home Show, Location Location Location Location Location etc, and many more besides.  To be fair, the evening ones on Channel 4 are quite good, but the daytime ones really do suck.  By far the worst is 60 Minute Makeover on ITV during the day.  I’ve only seen it once but it really is atrocious because they actually do do it in only 60 minutes.  How good do you reckon the finish is on that then?  You’re absolutely right, it’s bloody awful.  Can you imagine going out for a trip to ASDA one lunch time only to come home and find that 437 people have traipsed mud through your house, got paint all over your carpet, put up some nasty wallpaper without smoothing out the bubbles and “distressed” your perfectly good pine furniture?  I’d be horrified.  They’re always bleating on about how much the lucky recipient deserves it so I can only assume the people that nominate them REALLY hate them.

Of course, these property shows all started when there was a massive property boom that seemed like it would never end.  And now it has, so have they all gone away?  No they haven’t.  No, instead they’ve all changed.  Now there are endless references to the “current market” and very serious faces.  Some of the shows even want you to make do with what you’ve got, rather than try and make a profit out of your bricks and mortar.  You mean….you want me to….LIVE in the house?  Good grief, I’d never thought of that!  That said, the irritating bastards they find to do Location etc still manage to have budgets of £950k and I’ve never really been able to understand how.  What the hell do they do for a living?  Steal organs and sell them on the black market?  Annoying though the couples are I do have a soft spot for Kirstie and Phil.  They have such great chemistry, something that was sorely lacking when Kirstie’s sister took over for a short while.  In fact she had her own show recently on the BBC and just came across as a rude skinny sour faced bitch.  Maybe that was just me.

I often wonder how Sarah Beeny doesn’t lose her rag at people on Property ladder.  This is a woman who has been developing property from a young age, knows exactly what she’s doing and has made an absolute fortune out of it.  So if she wasn’t presenting a property programme her advice would probably cost a mint.  But do the first time developers ever take any notice of her sage advice?  Do they?  Of course they don’t!  They know it would be much better to spend £50k on the kitchen with diamond garden gnomes on that only they like than the £2k one from B&Q.  Grrrrrrrr.

And Grand Designs, God, there are so many.  But Grand Designs is a good one.  Kevin McCloud is very honest about whether he likes each house and always goes on about architectural stuff i don’t really get.  As far as I’m concerned some of the houses look lovely at the end and some are horrible.  And not a one of them ever looks like the kind of place you could or would live in.  They all look like airport lounges.  Every one of them.

But my favourite episode of one of these shows ever was an overseas special of “Selling Houses” where they do your pigsty up so someone will actually want to buy it.  On this special show they featured a couple who’d bought a cave house on the side of a mountain.  They were complaining that it was a bit damp.  Imagine that.

I came to a realisation this weekend.  It surprised me somewhat but I don’t really like alcohol any more.  Maybe it’s because I’ve not been able to drink for so long thanks to pregnancy and breastfeeding but even then I didn’t miss it.  Or maybe it’s because we don’t go out very often any more and the only opportunities to drink are at home.  And I’ve never liked that.  Regardless of where I lived and with whom, but especially when I lived with my parents.  It’s not cool to be drunk in front of your parents.  Or your friends’ parents.  That’s even less cool.

Sadly, I think I’ve been drunk in front of plenty of people’s parents in my time and I can only remember making a twat of myself, convincing myself I sounded completely sober while doubtless slurring my words and reeking of booze.  Always a good look.  In fact, now I come to think of it, my new anti-alcohol status largely stems from the sheer weight of times I’ve made a complete tit of myself in a public place in front of people I do and don’t know.  Apart from at my wedding (where I’m sure I made a tit of myself with all that beer, champagne, snakebite and tequila swilling about in my system) the last time I really properly went out I fell asleep in the toilets of Tiger Tiger.  For about an hour.  Adam was beside himself, he thought I’d buggered off.  No, I had just passed out, and that’s the first (and last) time that’s ever happened.  At least I think it is.  Of course I looked a complete tit.  And before I’d passed out in the toilets I’d looked a tit because I was trying to dance to cheesy music, very unsteadily.

We had a party for Miss Woolley’s birthday a couple of weeks ago.  We played Rock Band.  The only way I have the guts to sing publicly is if I’ve been drinking.  Except when I’ve been drinking my singing sounds awful.  We made margaritas and I sang a bit, very quietly before anyone was really around to hear me and before they realised there was a video camera on the premises.  Phew.  But although I didn’t make too much of a tit of myself (at least that I can remember) I still woke up the next day with the overwhelming feeling that I had.  And I had a stonking hangover.

I know plenty of people for whom excessive social drinking is a way of life, it’s not a good night if there isn’t a picture of them passed out on the floor or at a table or riding something in a children’s playground.  For me, I left that kind of drinking behind when I stopped being a teenager, back in the days when I drank only to get drunk.  And now I don’t even like the feeling of being drunk, not at the time and most definitely not the day after.  I must be getting old.  I don’t like drinking wine with dinner either, I’d much rather have a glass of coke.  No wine connoisseur, me.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to become a tee-totaller who looks disapprovingly at anyone else who exercises their right to an alcoholic beverage when the mood takes them.  I even still fancy the odd cold tasty beer or glass of pinot noir, it’s just that I can’t normally stomach more than one.  When I was in prison, I really missed drinking.  When I came out of prison Adam and I went out drinking all the time and we had a lovely time and no hangovers.  But normal life has now resumed, and with a small child in the house I’m far less inclined to go out or drink.  So I’ll stick to the occasional tasty beer and keep stuffing my face with pies instead.  I mean do lots of exercise!

Yesterday saw the passing of a major star, cruelly cut down in their prime.  And then Michael Jackson pegged it and stole all of Farah Fawcett’s thunder.  So now we are subjected to endless hastily cobbled together tributes about the life and times of Michael Jackson with little reference to the fact that he was a utter nutjob.  Yes, he was.  You see, this is what annoys me.  When people are alive and well they’re plastered all over the papers and those trashy magazines.  “Journalists” (for want of a better word) like to regularly shame them by dragging up nasty little tales of wrongdoing or, if they haven’t got evidence of anything, ridicule them for the way they dress or cut their hair.

Michael Jackson was ever the subject of such things, he was mostly referred to as Wacko Jacko (or Wacko Jackson as the woman on the BBC news said this morning, silly moo), and they loved it when he was publicly tried for sexual abuse against children, they always knew he was a wrong ’un.  They didn’t like it as much when he was found not guilty because they had to go back to taking the piss out of his rather alarming looks.  And they’d been doing that for years and it had become a bit boring.

But now he’s dead.  No more Wacko Jacko, no no, behold the “King of Pop”, a “musical genius”.  Hmmm.  Now, I’m not saying he didn’t used to be good, because he was, very good but that was a long long time ago.  Back before his skin became whiter than mine, and I’m practically blue.  And yes, it is sad that he’s dead (unless you believe the conspiracy theorists).  But people die.  Other people don’t seem to realise that we all will, even those who are in the public eye.  If you watch the news (which, frankly I’m now boycotting because of it all) you will see fans, hysterical with grief, sobbing into their floral tributes and utterly inconsolable.  Oh, so you knew him personally then?  Of course they didn’t.  I really can’t understand this behaviour.  It was the same with Princess Diana and that all seemed over the top to me too.  It went on for weeks.  Yes, it’s a shock when celebrities die, especially if they’re young, but they’re just people and for me the shock passes, I might say “oh, that’s a shame” and then I get on with my life.

Seemingly that’s just me, though, because the once reviled now become revered in the public eye.  Jade Goody is the perfect example of that.  Look back to when she first became well known on Big Brother and she was all over the tabloids referred to as an ignorant fat pig.  The British public hated her.  They hated her even more when she made racist comments to Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother.  And then she got cancer and died young.  The British public clearly has a very short memory because in some circles she is now likened to Princess Di.  Erm…. Only Michael Parkinson, it appears, had the guts to tell it like it is about Jade, “When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death, what we’re left with is a woman who came to represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today.”  The tabloids were up in arms, of course they were, because they were instrumental in the reinvention of Jade the fat pig as Jade the tragic cancer stricken mother.

The world’s media, it seems, has a major problem with perspective.  Too much store is held in celebrity in the modern world and the news of Michael Jackson’s death has overshadowed the infinitely more important story of the conviction of a 15 year old boy for murdering a toddler when he was babysitting her.  Now that story made me want to cry.