Imagine, please, that you were counting down the minutes until your death. What would you do differently? Quit hitting that Twitter refresh button? Take to the streets, rip off your shirt and demand everyone melts into a flabby mess of hedonistic love-making? It’s hard to say because, outside of the terminally ill, only a weirdo would count down the minutes to their death. I can’t comment on the character of Robert Holcomb from Philadelphia but I can tell you he guesstimates that he has 28,000 days to live, and believes he has to “make every second count”. Robert says this with a haunted look. He is one of four highly productive and unfathomably pressed time-saving individuals on Extreme Time Cheaters (Tuesday, 10pm, TLC).
Those who are already fans of the TLC network, like me, will have a sense of what’s up here. And for those who aren’t, just know that TLC is the home of such original programming as Cake Boss, My Strange Addiction, Say Yes To The Dress, Ballroom Bootcamp and Best Funeral Ever. In other words, it’s the kind of un-reality TV station that specialises in impossibly bizarre situations in highly edited segments with reaction shots, reaction shots of reaction shots, and recaps of the reaction shots that will surely cause the downfall of humanity as we know it. Extreme Time Cheaters may lack the disgust factor of Extreme Cheapskates or the heady thrill of Extreme Couponing, where shoppers trim down their bill from thousands of dollars to mere pennies, providing they don’t mind buying 639 cases of toilet roll at once and attracting sideways glances as they hand over reams of cut-out coupons at the till, but it’s a decent watch nonetheless.
It’s also a show I suspect Time Cheating husband and wife Ken and Barby (their real names) would be unlikely to squeeze in. Barby likes scheduling. She schedules everything, in colour-coded spreadsheets, including “intimate time” with Ken (dark blue, and done at the same time as the kettle’s boiling, also stringently scheduled). There is even time on the schedule for going over the schedule. How much time is spent making this schedule is never mentioned but I have no doubt it’s a highly efficient way of doing things.
Barby saves further time by washing her dirty dishes while in the shower with her and shaving her legs in the pool during aqua-aerobics. She can also claim the honour of being the only person in the history of the world to have said the words: “I’m living more life that’s better quality because I wear flip flops.” By not putting on shoes with sides, Barby saves herself six hours a year, a graphic tells us. Over the course of the programme, these graphics pop up repeatedly, to highlight how much time Veronica from New Jersey saves by getting a bikini wax at work, for instance, or how much Manuel extends his life by ironing his clothes with a coffee pot (six hours).
As somebody who enjoys staring into space for upwards of nine hours, looking out of the window, quietly muttering: “What even is time but a human construct, dude”, then looking out of the window again, I think I know a thing or two about leisure time. For the extreme time cheaters, though, it’s disturbingly unclear what they do with all the extra hours their time-hacks give them. Will they look back from their deathbeds (death seeming, on some level, to be the motivator here) and feel a smug sense of satisfaction at how well planned their lives were? Were the extra 67 minutes a day Robert saves by blending all his food really worth it if even a fraction of those 67 minutes are spent gulping down liquefied cheesesteak sandwiches? I’m not convinced. What is life, I find myself asking, if all pleasure is stripped from it, replaced by android hyper-efficiency. On a date, Robert keeps things moving by demanding his courses be brought to the table at the same time. His would-be inamorata doesn’t look impressed. “I want to find someone to tolerate me,” he says. “Not love, just tolerate.” OK, maybe Robert is wiser than he looks.