Wright On! Shelley Wright takes a wry look at life

PERHAPS it is because we are only weeks into the new year and everyone is still clinging to the old adage of 'out with the old and in with the new' or simply that I have spent my time watching endless amounts of TV but it seems everyone has become obsessed with re-inventing themselves, their homes and anything else in life that doesn't quite come up to scratch.

Every channel is full of home improving, self-improving shows that aim to transform some part of your life in 30 minutes flat, while the Sunday papers are full of supplements promising a new you in eight weeks or handy tips on creating a better life. The one that suggests you stop wasting it watching telly and read all those stupid self-help magazines has gone strangely astray.

But whether you can't cook or won't cook, desperately want to change your neighbour's room - or your neighbour for that matter - you can guarantee there's always something on if you're determined to watch it, which begs the question: Is no-one happy with what they already have? Or are we all being brainwashed by this onslaught of aspirational shows?

I mean, where are programmes like You Think Your Husband's Bad - Take a Look at Mine!, featuring wayward blokes which make your own seem positively perfect, or Ten Belly-Filling Meals From a Boiled Egg, to give basic cooks a boost. Surely they would make us all feel a bit better about our lives. But, no, instead we have to witness super-smart-alec Carol Vorderman spending £10,000 on a couple of neighbours homes to give them the chance of winning another £5,000 in that ridiculous new programme Better Homes. I mean, what kind of a game show is that?

All the contestants do is nominate a room for the team to transform, clear off to a hotel for the weekend and return to find it looking like a cover spread from Ideal Home magazine. Whatever happened to It's a Knockout? At least that made us feel better by making other people look like fools.

I mean, is Better Homes - but not necessarily better TV - supposed to make us leap from the settee and hot-foot it straight down to Do It All with nothing more than two shirt buttons and a packet of Wrigley's Extra to pay the bill?

And as for Changing Rooms, well, I tried changing my front room in a weekend and now I'm practically forced to sit glued to the TV because the decorating's so bad I daren't look up.

My grandma says all this re-invention is a worrying trend that is partly to blame for the breakdown in society and to some extent I can see her point - even if I don't entirely agree.

Rattle her cage about values today and the way people conduct their lives and get ready for a lengthy and well-rehearsed tirade against the so-called throwaway lifestyle of the 90s. "In my day," she often declares, "when people were married it was for life - no matter what happened, you didn't just walk away when you got a bit fed up. You persevered, worked at it."

So does that mean we shouldn't try and change our lives if things are less than the perfect 10? Should I be persevering with a particularly gloomy terracotta paint with a nasty pink tinge to it at night or should I have stuck with what I already had in the first place - when I was probably better off?

Well, let me tell you grandma, I am fed up with it and if I see another episode of anything remotely resembling a DIY show, it's curtains for my front room with or without Carol Vorderman's help.

Though I could put the £5,000 to good use.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.