Daytime TV Depression

Daytime TV has to be amongst the most depressing things any human being can experience.  No wonder the long-term unemployed are so miserable if they spend their mornings watching this dreck.  I was reminded of this when I was off work over Easter.  As if the abominable Jeremy Kyle (should we be surprised that this egotistical cock-end is a supporter of David Cameron) on ITV isn't bad enough, the 'alternatives' the BBC serve up are no better.  Take Homes Under the Hammer, for instance, whilst it doesn't include any baiting of hill billies from East Anglia like Kyle, its celebration of greed and profiteering is pretty repugnant.  It's parade of would-be property developers buying properties cheap at auction and then, after the minimum of remedial work, renting them out at extortionate prices to students and poor people are a pretty depressing bunch.  Get a real job, I always want to scream at them - they're the same sort of people who think it is possible to make a passive income from those internet get rich quick schemes.  Those buying properties to actually live in themselves are treated as if they are mentally deficient.  OK, I'm exaggerating somewhat and making some sweeping generalisations here, but you get the idea. An equally depressing aspect of the programme is the idea that you ave to decorate everything in dull colours as that makes properties easier to sell.  Individualism?  You don't want that - apparently avocado bathrooms are a deal-breaker when it comes to selling your house!

However, surely the most depressing of all the BBC's morning TV offerings has to be Heir Hunters.  This is the one where these rival companies vie to find the heirs of people who have died intestate and with no immediate family.  Obviously, they aren't doing this out of a sense of civic duty, I'm assuming that they get some kind of commission from the estates of the deceased for doing this.  Which seems pretty distasteful in itself - profiting from the lonely deaths of recluses.  Right from the off this programme is deeply depressing, introducing us to some poor dead person in the most downbeat manner possible:  "Arthur Cobblers died alone.  In fact, nobody even knew that he had died for seven months, until police broke into his squalid flat, after complaints from the neighbours about the smell.  'At first I thought the smell was down to the hundred pints or so of milk that had accumulated outside his front door and were going off,' Jim Arse, who had lived next door to Arthur for several years, told us. 'I just assumed he was one of those idle old gits who was too lazy to bring his milk in.'  His funeral was attended only by a lollipop man who happened to be passing the crematorium and had come in to shelter from the rain.  Arthur had lost touch with his friends and fallen out with his family following his arrest for possession of child pornography, ten years earlier.  Although he was later exonerated - the offending magazine having been delivered to his house as a result of a mix-up at his newsagents - he was never reconciled with his family, after they refused to post bail for him and had spray-painted the word 'Nonce' on his car.  The team's challenge now is to track down his remaining close family before his estate of £32.76 in a national savings account and his vast collection of pornographic magazines is claimed by the state."