While browsing the higher channels on our cable system in search of HDTV opportunities, I rediscovered BBC America.

It has been a long time since I ventured away from my little TV neighborhood of Court/TruTV, HGTV, Food Network, and A&E. So I was pleasantly surprised to see several shows of interest on BBC America.

I thought it would be sort of like the olden days. Specifically, my olden days of visiting Scotland and enjoying the four or six available telly channels, which made up for the lack of variety through supreme quality programming (plus a nice dose of my departed and decidedly clean Papa picking non-existent lint from the carpet in front of the coal fireplace, West Highland Terrier lazing nearby, and Gran making some tea with some lovely bread and jam, or biscuits).

Instead, BBC America is overrun with the same sort of pseudo-reality drivel that American television has to offer. In fact, some of BBC America's programming is the original version of some American television programs.

And, I'm hooked!

I've got our DVR set up to record two shows that air multiple times per day: How Clean Is Your House, and You Are What You Eat.

I was really missing the American version of How Clean Is Your House, which features two animated British ladies, Kim and Aggie, helping out of control slobs clean their filthy homes. I am convinced that people who have homes as filthy as these are mentally ill and need more than a good scrubbing to return them to the world of the straight and narrow, but the show makes for good telly.

So imagine my joy to see the original British version, featuring Kim and Aggie scraping their fingernails through the loo-grime of British mentally ill people with their delightfully old fashioned, non-updated filthy homes! What a departure from HGTV's world of snotty house flippers, quarter-million dollar (plus!) renovation budgets and serial relocators. After all, who can move when their government-owned (council) home is not only not staged, but is by all accounts uninhabitable due to sanitation issues? And who can upgrade to granite or hardwoods when the counters and floors are caked in grime and animal dung and three year old sodden putrefied fruit and maggots?

Yes, that is good telly right there.

As if that isn't good enough, I discovered You Are What You Eat, which is a sort of Intervention for the British obese person. To my knowledge, the show has not come to America yet.

The shows hostess, Gillian McKeith, erupts weekly into the life of a morbidly obese junk food eater, solving all problems by springing upon them an immediate vegan lifestyle accompanied by insults and stints on a mini trampoline.

Never mind the psychological reasons for turning to alcohol and bad food for comfort, or the reasons why a person would choose the sedentary life of a ridiculed and hated fat person. The underlying issues do not seem to be addressed.

Gillian isn't a bad person though. She is a no excuses kind of gal and I like that. After all, excuses and reasons don't solve problems. And she gets people to eat fruits and vegetables, even those people unfortunate enough to have been born to idiot parents who never fed their kids vegetables. I am sorry but it is annoying to see adults say, "I don't eat vegetables." Why not let stupid people like that just perish?

One of the best parts of the show is when the obese person is shown a table crammed full of food they have eaten in the past week. The tables seem to be full of beige foods, such as chips (fries), nuggets, chocolate, and booze, soda and coffee. Mostly this is the diet of the uneducated and poor.

Also, this is the diet of the two-income family who eats drive-through food and of the family that doesn't sit down at the table together for meals.

One of the things I pointed out recently on a popular message board is that people who eat like this and reject vegetables and fruits are often referred to as "picky eaters" and this behavior is often supported by parents. We are even on the second generation of people who only eat macaroni and cheese, white meat chicken, and pasta and nuggets.

To me, this is not "picky eating" but rather "garbage eating".

We really need to bring Gillian McKeith to America to kick our garbage-eating asses. I hope it doesn't take two or three generations to remove us from the junk it took two generations to get us into.