Target and its hidden-camera 'shocks'

I'm kind of annoyed at last night's controversial episode of Target. In case you missed it (and please don't tell me I need to put a spoiler warning here), the team at Target employed a carpet cleaning company to take care of a filthy lounge floor and a wild red wine stain in the master bedroom, as part of their weekly hidden camera trial. The guy seemed nice enough when he arrived, smiling as he shook the hand of the homeowner (hopefully played by a paid actress). It looked like a pretty standard hidden camera segment.

It doesn't take long before the carpet cleaner starts behaving inappropriately: he starts by rifling through the homeowner's chest of drawers, then looking through her laundry basket and sniffing several items of clothing. He wanders around the house looking for a perfume bottle, which he takes back to the master bedroom and sprays on a pair of underwear. He then turns on the household computer, connects it to the internet, and proceeds to look at pornography.

He then uses the underwear and masturbates - not once, but twice - then erases the internet browsing history, disconnects the internet cable, places the used underwear back in the laundry basket, and gets on with the job at hand (I mean the carpet cleaning), before heading off on his merry way.

Carly Flynn and the Target team didn't reveal who he was, or which carpet cleaning company it was, but they did mention that police had charged him with burglary and unlawful access of a computer. I'd imagine most carpet cleaning companies will be fielding questions of the "hey, that wasn't you guys on Target, was it?" variety for the next week or so.

But Target also left out one key piece of information, and that's why I'm annoyed:

How clean were the carpets?

Okay, okay, I'm only kidding - nobody cares how clean the carpets were. Even the people behind Target don't really care, do they? After all, we don't really care if the carpets get cleaned, the wiring gets fixed or the firewood gets delivered. We're looking for something shocking, something that will make us gasp in surprise.

We don't want any trouble when a repairman comes into our own homes. But when our entertainment is at stake, we want the tradesman to go through the drawers, pull items of clothing out of the laundry basket, look at websites that need to be blurred out when they're shown on TV. We want Carly Flynn to be forced into describing a lewd sequence of events as "disgusting" and we want to stare at our screens, our mouths agape.

Just don't tell me that the Target hidden-camera segments - entertaining though they might be - are part of some form of informative viewing. I think, deep down, we know - or at least, we assume - that the tradesman is going through our bedside tables and looking through our family photos, just as we know that the girl at the movie theatre counter is selling R16 tickets to 12-year-olds and that café staff are selling alcohol to minors.

We know it, and we repress it because the awful truth is that we don't really care. For the most part, as long as any individual person's behaviour doesn't affect us directly, we don't really mind what they do.

Last night's episode of Target wasn't surprising because of what the carpet cleaner did; we all knew what was coming*. Most of us will have automatically made the jump in logic and assumed that the worst is about to happen, because we know that people are capable of the worst possible behaviour.

But film it with hidden cameras, and we'll absolutely pretend we're shocked and horrified.

Did you watch Target last night? Were you honestly shocked by anything you saw?

(*) No pun intended ... okay, it was.

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