Housey-housey

If the first sign of madness is talking to yourself, where does shouting at the television rank? There's a programme on in the afternoons called "The House Doctor" where an American lady helps people who are finding difficulty in selling their houses. This invariably involves a certain amount of redecorating, and what she calls "decluttering". Prospective buyers are filmed giving their comments before and after. Makes for reasonably good television, but are these prospective buyers for real, or are they told what to say? I suspect the latter, but if they really are genuine and unscripted, then you do wonder about their intelligence. Who in their right mind would walk into a room of a house they were considering buying and say "Oh, I don't like all this furniture". This is the point at which I have to stop myself screaming at the screen "You idiots, if you buy the house, this will be an empty room". And "I don't like this wallpaper" has me wanting to shout "Well, change it then - you're almost certainly going to have to anyway". Surely what any sensible prospective purchaser is looking at is the potential, rather than the actuality. The worrying thing is that apparently the House Doctor is successful - houses which have not sold tend to sell after her ministrations, which seems to suggest that the average prospective buyer is in fact pretty stupid.