Even while more and more people are fleeing the office to work from home in their pyjamas, television programmers continue to assume that anyone at their place of abode between the hours of 9am and 3pm must be a fat housewife with bad skin contemplating her imminent death.
Why else would every second TV ad promote Proactive skincare (Delta Goodrem, what were you thinking?) or an elliptical exercise machine that promises to shift three dress sizes just by looking at it?
Every other ad insists we lay-by our funeral expenses right now, lest our loved ones be left with no spare cash to bury us.
And of course there is Kerri-Anne Kennerley. Sometimes I wonder if people only get "real jobs" to avoid having to watch KAK (sometimes known as "cack").
Working from home requires discipline and I am a disciplined home-worker.
That said, I do like to leave the television on in the background, ostensibly to reassure myself that I haven't slipped into a parallel dimension and that if I did indeed step outside, I wouldn't suddenly discover that everyone else had left for Venus several weeks ago.
So I consider myself somewhat of an authority on daytime TV (not that anyone's asking).
And I can attest that many people who work from home and therefore do have some disposable income, are not remotely interested in buying a ShamWow, a Zumba, a Genius Speed Slicer, a Mr T Turbo Oven, Slim-n-Lift Jeans, or pay-as-you-drive car insurance.
Nope, not even if you throw in another product for free when I phone within 15 minutes.
We would, however, be interested in buying functional home office equipment, well-priced software training products, mixed wine dozens, business seminar packages, theatre program specials and cultural travel tours - none of which require a half-priced Ultra 2000 Steam Mop to sweeten the deal. Trust me.
Daytime TV persists with the practice of loosely draping a talkshow format around a series of home shopping infomercials.
Hosts even attempt to banter with the salespeople in between segments, as if to show that light entertainment and hard-core selling are just yin and yang, baby.
The latest incarnation, The Circle, is Australia's second answer to The View, the first being The Catch-Up, which could also have been called The Long, Awkward Conversation.
All the usual suspects are here: the token plus-sized girl (Chrissie Swan), the token minority (half-Asian Yumi Stynes), the token senior citizen ("Ding Dong" Denise Drysdale) and the token attractive anchor (Gorgi Coghlan).
They talk about films, fashion and frivolity and at the end of each show they sit down to a gourmet meal of sorts and chat in that natural way that people do when sitting in a TV studio surrounded by hot lights and camera people.
They're trying so hard - and I admire that, I really do - but when will TV programmers learn that if home-based workers wanted to listen to inane water-cooler chatter among people we barely know, we'd get an office job again.
Gotta run. There's an old Get Smart episode starting on payTV.
carrieon@bigpond.cox< p>
Email a friend