Ah, the middle-class-lifestyle makeover show. Fire up BBC Two or Channel 4 at 8.30 on any midweek evening in the past 20 years and you’ll have had a good chance of seeing a toothy expert giving advice to people who would be absolutely fine if left to their own devices. Homeowners ask for help to further enrich themselves; people whose clothes aren’t quite right are shown more stylish outfits to buy.
It’s a genre that dislikes jeopardy – and there’s very little in the new Netflix documentary Get Smart With Money, a US take on domestic financial management. Four hapless punters are taken under the wing of a money guru, but as well as being oddly formatted – what you would expect to be an episodic series is presented as a feature-length one-off – the film is mainly concerned with comforting the already comfortable.
