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Television|Kim Woodburn, British TV’s No-Nonsense ‘Queen of Clean,’ Dies at 83
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/arts/television/kim-woodburn-dead.html
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She was a blunt and bossy domestic dominatrix on the series “How Clean Is Your House?” honing a persona as the rudest woman on reality television.
June 19, 2025, 5:41 p.m. ET
Kim Woodburn, the platinum-haired, trash-talking darling of British reality television who found fame as a domestic dominatrix in the long-running series “How Clean Is Your House” and in other shows of the mean TV genre, died on Monday. She was 83.
Her death, after a short illness, was announced in a statement by her manager. It did not specify a cause or say where she died.
Ms. Woodburn had been working in Kent, England, as a live-in housekeeper for a Saudi sheikh when her employment agency asked her to audition for a new Channel 4 reality show. The idea was that she and Aggie MacKenzie, a brisk Scottish editor at the British version of Good Housekeeping magazine, would invade the houses of slobs, hoarders and other housekeeping failures and teach them how to mend their messy ways.
She was 60 years old at the time, and she nailed the audition, which involved scrutinizing a young woman’s grimy flat in West London.
“Well, this is a flaming comic opera, isn’t it,” Ms. Woodburn declared in the woman’s terrifyingly filthy kitchen, as she recalled in her 2006 memoir, “Unbeaten: The Story of My Brutal Childhood.” “You look so clean yourself, and yet you live like this. Talk about fur coat, no knickers!”
