Dont’ watch Dom, he’s dumb

by Jimmy Rasher

As summertime is usually the season of death for door-to-door cutlery selling, I’ve been staying in my pyjamas and watching daytime television.

This was still a fairly new and experimental concept when I was at the height of my own TV career, so I was interested to see how it has developed.

Not very well is the simple answer.

Daytime TV, like it was back in the day, is the residential home for all those not talented enough to make it onto prime-time. There is one glorious exception, although strictly speaking it inhabits 24-hour TV-land – more of that later.

But a classic example of all that is wrong with daytime telly is captured in BBC1′s morning schedule.

It is infested with property programmes and so-called experts rummaging around people’s piles of junk trying to earn them the £4.99 they need to fulfil their life-long dreams.

But it all kicks off with Don’t Get Done, Get Dom – a show fronted by a self-styled consumer champion who seems like a cross between an ugly Hobbit and a bouncer at an under-10s disco:

The point of the programme appears to be our hero helping people who are too dim-witted, introverted or just plain uninteresting to save a few pennies on something. The diminutive, balding, motormouth also fights for our consumer rights by taking on nasty and unscrupulous traders.

Its rubbish. I had to watch it three or four times to confirm just how irritated I became whilst watching it.

The concept is pretty good, but why pick a presenter you would probably cross over the road to avoid should he be walking towards you?

The others shows in the schedule are similarly inhabited by the smug, the unattractive, the plain silly and the type you would want your local landlord to banish forever from your favourite pub.

But then redemption appeared as I flicked my way through the channels and found a television ghetto inhabited by a plethora of shopping programmes. My best are QVC (for the foxy female presenters) and Ideal World (for the horrible products they sell).

It is mildy addictive, you find yourself getting sucked into thinking that a paper crafting set for less than £20 including P+P is an absolute bargain.

I’ll admit I’ve splashed out a bit of my hard-earned cutlery selling cash. I’ve bought my darling mother a stylish winter house coat that you can also wear outside and be the envy of every other member of the WI:

I also decided to splash out on some state-of-the-art technology to help me with my cutlery selling.

I’ve bought the world’s smallest and thinnest mobile, pocket calculator to help me add stuff up:

So, after my initial scepticism about the quality of today’s daytime TV, I can see that there are huge benefits.

But only if you stick to the shopping channels.

I’ll be watching more telly over the next few days so if anything else interesting crops up – or if I pick up a few more bargains – I’ll let you all know.