Even Desperate Housewives is beginning to feel like they're toying with us.
The Greek government has told its eurozone creditors it has a novel way of tackling the country's chronic tax evasion culture – wiring students, tourists, and housewives for sound and video to spy on tax dodgers while posing as shoppers and customers.
When Latifi first advertised for chef mums she was overwhelmed by the numbers who applied, from well-off housewives who wanted to be active in the societyto "single mums who take care of a whole family – I'm happy our project is helping them in a way as well".
"Perhaps here, even if things are changing, which they are, the prevailing image of women [on television] is as housewives, mothers … or as showgirls, that kind of thing," she says.
Children make chalk drawings on the roads, senior citizens settle for a comfortable round of carrom, a local board game, while a folk singer has housewives clapping along to a energising beat.
Londoners will be thinking of the Shoreditch experience here – all those bars with expensive fit-outs, all that immigration from Notting Hill (NH is so over, so investment banker Desperate Housewives now).
The best that can be said is that this crushing conventionality conceals an enthusiastic sex life, as in the American series Desperate Housewives.
And if that means telling slack-jawed, home shopping-narcotised housewives that I have personally thrown in a suede-effect mini tote just for them, as a holiday gift, then I'm going to do it with all the attention to detail I bring to any other of my will-this-do retail enterprises.
No wonder her man-eating Desperate Housewives character was so predatory.
Celebrity stylist Aaron Gray – who was recently anointed the "gay bestie" to Real Housewives of Atlanta star Nene Leakes – told me that he has experienced street harassment for as long as he can remember.
