The no-nonsense tips that made Kim Woodburn the original Cleanfluencer, plus the 10-minute method that brought her fame
The TV personality and cleaning whizz has given us much-needed life advice over the years, which is even more appreciated after the sad news of her passing away earlier this week.
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The 83-year-old is reported to have passed away from a short illness, leaving her husband and friends heartbroken.
Kim rose to fame in Channel 4 's hit series How Clean is Your House where she showed people how to really keep their house in order.
Here, we look back on her 11 no-nonsense tips for a spick and span home that she previously shared with Fabulous.
Clean as you go
Now listen, lazy bones. If you put a drink back in the fridge and it falls over, you think you'll get back to it tomorrow. Oh no, you don't – clean it up it right away! It takes seconds to clean things up as you go. You've no need to make a song and dance about it.
Steam your shower walls
You know those little steamers you can buy to steam your kitchen floors? What they don't tell you is they are perfect for cleaning your shower walls, too. They are as light as a feather and it cleans the tiles up a treat.
Use old towels to clean your oven
All the old towels you've got, never throw them out, my loves - cut them into strips. They're rough and ready. Dip them in some warm soapy water with a bit of bicarbonate of soda to clean your oven.
Hot wash your sheets
All sorts of things fall off our bodies, especially if you're very hairy. Put your sheets on a hot wash at least once a week, no lower than 60 degrees, or 80 degress if you can. You're lying on them, dear, doing all sorts. You might be a very passionate person.
Sack off your sponge
Don't use a sponge to wash up – they are filthy. You need a flat cloth or a dish-washing brush so if there's any dirt in there you can rinse it under the tap. But a sponge, my loves – they're the most unhygienic.
Shop around
The Pound Shop have some extremely cheap cleaners. There's no excuse for anyone to say they can't afford them. There are so many choices, so hunt around. If not, use lots of vinegar and warm water to clean the windows. It does a super job - it's the old remedy.
So long, shoes
You go out in your shoes down the road and there's dog pee that you step in or spit on the pavement. Make sure you have a good, rough carpet so when you stand on it, rub your shoes. You only have to pick up that rug and bang it on the outside wall - my God, you'll go blind.
Deep clean your fridge
Once every couple of months, take all your fridge out - it takes five minutes. Get a nice towelling cloth and some warm water. Dip it in bicarb and lovie, it's spotless. Do not leave your fridge for more than two months. When you start going over that, my loves - by God, you're asking for trouble.
Toaster terror
Take out the tray at the bottom of your toaster at least once a week. Whip out an old newspaper and thump that toaster and the crumbs all come out. Then roll up the paper, dear, and throw it away. People say: 'Oh, my toaster smells of burning.' Yes, it's year-old breadcrumbs you lazy pigs.
Filter fail
If you've got a vacuum, do yourself a favour and clean the filters. You see people run a vacuum up and down the rug, but it's not picking anything up. Does it not occur to you that the filter's full? Use your common sense.
10 minute method
Kim has also shared her hack for making cleaning tasks a bit easier with the Express.
Clean as you go and throw as you go. If you do that you can't go wrong. If you let it build then you have a huge task ahead of you. It only takes a small amount of time. Ten minutes every day and you can keep everything manageable
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He should be remembered not just as a great screen actor and inimitably eccentric man, but as someone who kept a healthy degree of scepticism about show business. He once confessed to being so poor in the Nineties that he was unable to afford a bus ticket, but had his own splendidly unusual means of making money. 'Fortunately I'd bought all this white wine, Chateau d'Yquem, in the Sixties. I hadn't drunk much of it, so, whenever things got tight, I could sell a case and that would tide me over.' Somehow, selling fine wine from that decade he helped define says far more about Stamp than any number of Star Wars blockbusters might. Long may this oddball wonder be remembered and celebrated. Terence Stamp's five greatest roles 1. Billy Budd (1962) It was somehow typical of Stamp that his film debut, in which he appeared at the age of 24, saw him nominated for an Oscar and Bafta, as well as winning him a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year. The awards boards were not wrong. Stamp's performance as the saintly, beautiful new crewman on board ship during the Napoleonic Wars, who arises first the lust and then the fury of the martinet John Claggart, is remarkable, bringing a strangeness and erotic tension to what may otherwise have been a relatively formulaic naval adventure. Benjamin Britten wrote a famous opera based on the same Melville novella a decade before, and could only have wished for a Budd of the same charisma as Stamp. 2. Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) Nicolas Roeg soon became best known as a director rather than a cinematographer, but it's his photography of Julie Christie and Stamp in this quintessentially Sixties Thomas Hardy adaptation that lifts what might otherwise be a dated picture into the realms of the sublime. Stamp always looked magnificent on screen – 'bone structure…my father had it too', he once explained, in a suitably offhand fashion – but what he does here is to turn Hardy's superficially seductive but weak and vacuous rake-sergeant into a figure of such gravitational draw that it's impossible not to imagine the entire cast, male and female alike, signing up to enlist if he'll be their officer in charge. 3. Superman II (1980) 'Kneel before Zod!' Whichever version of the Superman sequel you watch – the campier, Richard Lester-directed one or the reconstructed, statelier Richard Donner incarnation – there can be little doubt that Stamp's return to mainstream cinema proved to be well worth it. It was, of course, a payday gig, but the actor needed the work, remarking that, when he received the offer of the part, 'I remember opening the envelope, and there was a tremor in my hand. I think I knew that my life was about to change.' What Stamp does so well is to underplay the character of General Zod (in stark contrast to Michael Shannon in Man of Steel), giving him a curiously detached attitude to humanity that makes the comic-book villain seem just as inimitable a Stamp character as anyone else that he played before or afterwards. He acts everyone else – even Gene Hackman – off the screen. 4. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Stamp expressed a certain degree of hesitation over playing the trans character Bernadette in the camp, outrageous comedy Priscilla, not because of any latent homophobia but because, touchingly, he was unsure that he was the right actor for a role that was miles away from anything that he had ever done before. The director Stephan Elliott's belief that the English thespian would do a magnificent job in the central part of Bernadette was swiftly vindicated. While his co-stars Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving camp it up to high heaven – as the picture demands – as a pair of drag queens, Stamp's still, often very affecting performance counts as one of this fine actor's very best. It was once hoped that he would reprise the role in a sequel, but alas events have terminally intervened on that score. 5. The Limey (1999) Stamp appeared in two outstanding gangster pictures as a mature actor, this and Stephen Frears' masterly, enigmatic The Hit. Either could have appeared on this brief list, but while The Hit perhaps belongs ultimately to John Hurt, there is no doubt that in Soderbergh's full-throated homage to Sixties crime cinema, Stamp is the USP throughout. There were undeniably times in the Eighties and Nineties – and beyond – where it felt as if the actor was simply bestowing off-the-peg gravitas to projects that barely deserved him. But here, he was allowed to channel far more profound emotions, and his performance as a scrappy avenging angel, by times tender, feral and primal, has to rank as one of his very greatest.
