The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: a rare TV show that will change your life for the better

Amy Poehler narrates this soft, soul-cleansing delight – which will make you go for a chic black coffee then throw away nine boxes of rubbish. Blessed relief!

Very rare a TV show affects me anymore, of course. I have seen, simply, too many of them. I have seen every configuration of dating show and every possible ITV2 Love Island spin-off reality format. I’ve seen every Channel 4 property programme and every doomed BBC One attempt at a Saturday night light entertainment blockbuster. I was the person who watched every single British odd couple road trip show they made in the wake of Covid. I’ve seen those shows on Apple TV+ that even the executives at Apple TV+ forgot they commissioned (“Hold on, what’s this line on the balance sheet marked ‘Joseph Gordon-Levitt’? We paid him for that?”). Every brown-and-grey “the enemy is at the gates, my lord!” attempt at an epic franchise in the wake of Game of Thrones and all the spin-off stuff Prime has done since The Boys. TV can’t get me any more. I’m TV-proof. I cannot be swung by TV! My nervous system is too dulled!

But I do have to concede that W’s new US import, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (Thursday, 9pm), did make me go round my office with a bin bag and not stop until I’d filled it with detritus (as ever, the thought is: “how long have I been living surrounded by a bin bag full of detritus?”). It’s a simple remix of Marie Kondo’s massive Netflix hit from a couple of years ago, which you might remember from that weekend you got all weird and said goodbye to your old socks one by one. Based on a New York Times bestselling book, Death Cleaning … explains the Swedish philosophy of clearing your house out of all your collected crap well in time for your death, a sort of semi-holy ceremonial tidy-up that allows you to confront the end of your life in a pragmatic way as well as gift treasured items to those in your family who might remember you by them. It does not feel like you need to be dying to get something out of this, though: in truth, it’s just another self-help book that uses a load of quirky terms and umlauts to tell you to just – for goodness sake, come on! – tidy up your loft a bit, please.

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