The new scoundrel of 3Cat
The 3Cat platform has launched a talent show frivolous and grotesque. The title perfectly summarizes the theme: Clean and polishedIt's a competition hosted by Maria Gomez where the winner is the one who cleans up the most mess. The waste from a barbecue area, the stands of a football stadium, festival buses, campsite toilets, the sand on the beach after a drinking session, a hotel room, or a party venue. It works through team competitions, where participants are eliminated and a panel of experts evaluates their effectiveness. There are also challenges related to tidiness, organization, and specific cleaning tasks. The pretext for justifying this supposedly educational game is that it raises awareness about recycling. A failed excuse when it's obvious that all the mess the contestants have to clean is a staged and forced performance. The program itself is a generator of mess because it uses kilos and kilos of food waste, cardboard, glass, plastic, scrap material, and other waste just to create the garbage that the contestants will clean. It's as if they'd ransacked the shelves of a huge discount store, scattering everything and ruining it. A cleaning contest where the amount of trash is unbelievable already shows that it's more than just... show that of talent, especially from those who do it.
The message conveyed by the program reveals a complete lack of awareness: it gamifies one of the most precarious jobs in the country. It in no way dignifies it, because the mess is recreated. It scores higher points for doing the job at top speed and against the clock, as if it were normal to make cleaning professionals work like that. On top of that, they have the nerve to sell it as if it represents a sublime pleasure: "My favorite smell is ammonia!" says one contestant.
On the other hand, Clean and polished It seems to encourage incivility. Public spaces are littered as if it were normal to find them in that condition. The idea is given that you can make as much of a mess as you want, that someone will always come along and pick up your trash. Normalizing hotel rooms that look like they've been occupied by vandals is reckless, because it presupposes someone's obligation to clean them up quickly as if it were fun. It also creates the false idea that cleaning requires a special talent, which is the great excuse of the dirtiest people: "Those who know how to clean, clean." The height of absurdity is seeing women in some episodes crying from the guilt of not having properly cleaned a sooty grill or because an oil stain won't come out of their jeans. It's sold as an exciting part of the game, but it perpetuates the stigma of female domestic failure.
Turning a sector as exploited and precarious as cleaning—a job often done by people in vulnerable situations—into a spectacle is a form of classism. That this happens on public television demonstrates a complete lack of social awareness. Entertainment also shapes values and conveys a message, but it's obvious that this channel disregards both its function and its responsibility.