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and the subsequent reek can spoil the mood if you’re trying to get off with someone, so instead we went to the local pound shop and bought some rat traps, slid them gingerly into the bathroom and waited. And waited. And finally, after 24 hours, we heard death arrive with a loud SNAP.
    Except it wasn’t death. The trap had simply torn one of the rat’s ears off. A trail of ratty blood led from the trap to the hole. I felt sad and sick and mournful, but re-set the trap with a sense of duty – the next snap would surely finish the poor thing off. This was now a mercy killing. Another day passed, and then SNAP.
    This time it had lost part of its face. More blood, but still no body. Clearly, this wasn’t a rat trap. It was a rat whittling machine. We were inadvertently subjecting the rat to the sort of torture you’d see in one of the Saw movies. That’s what you get for using pound shops. Unable to bear the guilt, I went out and bought a deluxe top-of-the-range trap called something like RatFuck 2000. It looked like it could slaughter a bear.
    Instead it ripped its tail off. I quivered with shame; shouted apologies down the hole, like a concentration camp guard appalled by his own actions. There was no option now but to repeat the process of tearfully setting and re-setting the trap, until finally, onthe third day, Mr Rat went to heaven. He was huge and probably deserved a decent burial, but we didn’t know what to do with him so instead we wrapped him in a carrier bag and, in the dead of night, threw him in a bin across the road, feeling like Dennis Nielsen.
    All of which is an overlong and indulgent introduction to what will now be a brief review of Help Me Anthea, I’m Infested! , a bizarre little show in which Turner teams up with a cheery/chubby exterminator and sets about ridding folk’s houses of rats, fleas, ants, cockroaches, lice and probably wolves. Normally I’d watch this sort of thing with one side of my face sneering and the other chortling. But thanks to my harrowing rat experience, I found it uncharacteristically hypnotic. Despite her image as a kind of walking, talking doily, Anthea turns out to be a hard, judgemental piece of work who spends most of her time haranguing the human inhabitants for living in filth. The end result is a strange psychodrama in which the punters are caught between unfeeling vermin on one side, and an unfeeling former Blue Peter presenter on the other. And in the background, millions of insects being turned into corpses by the exterminator. There’s shrieking and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and then, finally, salvation. In the first show, a woman whose flat had been cleared of an ant infestation described it as a ‘lifechanging experience’.
    It’s empowerment through genocide, essentially. Yes. Empowerment through genocide. Great name for a band. Odd concept for a series.
They walk and they don’t smile [6 October 2007]
    ‘They walk and they don’t smile. I wonder where this lifestyle is taking them.’ As succinct a summary of commuters as you’ll find, and it comes from a Tanna tribesman crossing Waterloo Bridge, walking against the flow of grim-faced drones scurrying toward another day pulling metaphorical levers in the office.
    It’s an encounter which pretty much sums up Meet The Natives , Channel 4’s quirky anthropology in reverse show in which theaforementioned Chief Yapa and four of his buddies (Albi, Posen, Joel and JJ) visit Britain to mingle with some tribes of our own – the working class, the middle class and the upper class.
    In these wearying, we’re-so-good-at-telly times, I’d assumed Meet The Natives was going to be a fairly hateful laugh-and-point sniggerfest in which a bunch of hilarious primitives were manipulated by producers into making arsing great tits of themselves. And I wasn’t alone. Before it had even aired, an article for the website of this newspaper sniffily described it as ‘part of TV’s new cultural voyeurism’, which