Not proud of myself 😆 but I was ghoulishly fascinated by this programme as I bought an excellent sour dough tutorial on-line from Charlie Gray (Mrs Prude) and have followed her on and off ever since.
Despite the appearance of being a trad home-maker, she actually seems to be very serious about her business, and either has the energy of three people or can afford lots of help behind the scenes; I can’t decide which! But she creates lots of content twice weekly and has a podcast so she’s not exactly shirking!
She also collaborates with quite a lot of niche traditional brands and businesses which I can’t imagine will have been particularly thrilled by her association with porn, however tangentially.
When she announced she was going to be appearing on tv, I thought she was aiming at being the next Mary Berry or something 😃 so although it was a brave decision, I was very surprised by her choosing to appear in this series as I thought it erred far too far on the side of exploitative and trashy, while masquerading as a social experiment. The fact that Jonathan Ross presented it should have been a red flag imho! I made it through to the end but only just!
I know it was an over-reaction for her dh to cry, and they were both very rude initially to Rob, but I also thought it must have been hard for Mr Prude to be exposed on screen like that - it was very uncomfortable viewing - and her teens must have found that difficult too. Not exactly “family first” but I suppose she couldn’t have known that was going to happen! And it all turned out ok in the end. And anyone with common sense knows that if you give up editorial control to others and your brand is your traditional family life you are risking that being disrupted in some way? So maybe it was a strategic decision?
Some of the contestants were hideous and were obviously chosen very cynically for that very reason. There never was any hope of them changing eg the ghastly Hitler painting guy with his ghastly friends and I may be wrong but I didn’t quite trust the Reform guy’s sudden “conversion”. The youth counsellor guy he was chained to should have won an award for tolerance.
I think the programme should have had better psych safeguarding as I thought the ADHD lady and the horse lady had some sort of mh issues. The ADHD lady mentioned how lonely she was and how she didn’t see her dc and had very little insight as to why, and and the horse lady seemed so brittle and abrasive and was clearly vulnerable imho behind the extreme defensiveness, I don’t think either should have been on tv. Very poor values displayed by Channel 4!
Tilly was an absolute star and I hope she will get some tv work out of this! Although she didn’t complain, she obviously could have done with the money. And she would have helped others with it as well! I didn’t like Anthony much I’m afraid even at the end!
I’m very glad Rob won some money as he seemed very genuine but thought it was far easier for Charlie to preach about “putting family before money” as she appears to be much more financially stable and he was not that long ago living in his car. However, they did hint at the end that they were going to do something good with the prize money and I hope that’s the case! Hope Rob gets to keep some for himself too to put away for the future.
For me the best people in the programme were the members of the public and taxi driver(s) who went out of their way and helped them for nothing! And, to be fair, both Rob and Charlie did well to persevere at the end after a delayed start and seemed to have formed a genuine friendship,
Agree with PPS that overall the series was all over the place, strangely edited, an amalgam of different programmes, which lacked clear direction and went for the cheap exploitative exposure! Disappointing from Channel 4. It was an interesting idea and they took the low road.