Homes under the Hammer Horror

If you've ever been unemployed and faced a day of dull nothingness. Where the only useful thing you've done is change a loo roll, and nearly messed that up. As you creep into the dark ether of hopelessness. You are probably familiar with Homes under the Hammer, an eerie programme where presenters that look like ex members of Buck Fizz and footballer, and Dube inventor, Dion Dublin,

http://www.thedube.com/ take you around creepy abandoned houses and show you harrowing scenes of pink baths and un-pointed roofs.

The fat medium one, then contacts poltergeist property developers on a plaster Ouji board, with the haunting chant of 'have you checked the legal pack' and 'it's got a lot of potential', as Dion bangs loudly on his percussive instrument.

This stirs the un-dead to rise from out of their crypts and transform characterful properties into generic, ghostly white hotel rooms in exchange for the fresh blood of housing tenants that grey skinned estate agents happily provide.

It's sadly missing Christopher Lee, but it is certainly one of the most frightening of the Hammer series. A real psychological, sleep wrecker. What's most disturbing is that the flesh eating poltergeists are never defeated or stopped in their incessant rampage of blood sucking terror.

Instead they are mawkishly paraded by the possessed presenters, cheered in their onslaught of knocking down walls and building large patio areas, that they will subsequently barbecue their unsuspecting victims on.

It is quite gruesome and completes a day time schedule from the BBC of horror flicks such as

'Escape to the country', where quiet country villages are seized upon by alien life forms that want to build out of period extensions, and holiday cottages for their retirement invasion.

To the graphic, sadistic, possession porn of programmes like Cash in the attic and Bargain hunt, where an evil, moustached devil, in a bright coloured waistcoat, forces people to sell materialist, misery manacles to unsuspecting victims, while competing against other unfortunate slaves, for the chance to free their souls.

By the end of a day watching these programmes I feel queasy, unsettled, physically shaken by what I've seen. I turn the TV off and stare at the walls of my one bedroom flat, with the extortionate rent that has no antiques in it, just a big flat screen telly. And I close my eyes, try to dream of a world that has beauty in it, that has hope, that has love, but I find I've run out of toilet roll.