They’d Make a Duvet for My Remote

Two picture-perfect blonds with happy faces are conversing in a warm, cozy, countrified, sunlit room right out of a bed and breakfast.

One is demonstrating something even Martha Stewart may not have thought of: How to cover books with fabrics that match the upholstery.

“Ohhh, good,” the host chirps eagerly. “I’m always looking for books that coordinate with the fabric of my room.”

Well, who isn’t?

Does this mean, though, that if you’re seeking a particular passage in “War and Peace” or whatever, you’re out of luck if you can’t remember it’s behind the plum paisley? Or . . . let’s see, where is that copy of “Lolita”? Yup, the lemon chintz. Or is it the mint green check? No, that’s “The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling.”

The program is Cindy Piccoli’s “Decorating With Style.” And to be fair, the designer-books chat is cited here out of context. A big, fat cheap shot. There were also tips on creative ways to match your pillows with wallpaper. And I can’t quite recall, but I think that it was also from Piccoli’s show that I first heard about turning vintage handkerchiefs into pillows. In any case, I’m now seeing my own vintage handkerchiefs through fresh eyes.

To be doubly fair, this program appears on Home & Garden Television (HGTV), a Knoxville, Tenn.-based, E.W. Scripps Co.-owned cable channel that I happily flee to more and more in my quest for the Holy Grail of no-stress television.

Sweet serenity, I believe I’ve found it.

You can have your MTV, your ESPN, your CNN, your MSNBC and all the other options in the great head-splitting, migrainous pantheon of chaos and information overload.

I demand my HGTV.

My household is one of 40 million that this 24-hour niche, interactive, how-to network is reaching as it nears its fourth birthday.

A cartoon in this week’s New Yorker shows a man in an easy chair transfixed in front of a TV set over the caption: “Life Without Parole.” Well, if you’re going to be a lifer, at least think low blood pressure.

HGTV offers 15 decorating and design shows, 14 on building and remodeling, another 14 on gardening and landscaping, five on crafts and hobbies and a dozen more on other topics. It’s a virtual household curriculum. There’s even something called “At the Auction,” which candidly, I do find a bit stressful (“I have $200 in the center of the room, do I have 250?”).

But count me in for Joan Kohn’s “Kitchen Design” and its soothing background harp music. I could listen just about forever to HGTV’s clever landscaping/gardening maven, Paul James. And I’m instantly seduced by all the room and house redo shows, affirming that, at least in my case, television doesn’t have to be useful to be, you know, useful.

Just about every neighborhood has at least one guy who has a shop in his garage and works in it late at night. But doing what? I don’t get it.

As someone who needs to wear safety glasses while changing a lightbulb, the conversational data that flows from HGTV has limited practical value for me. When I paint even something small, I end up painting myself. My last project, replacing a toilet seat, ended disastrously. When my wife and daughter left on an outing, I was in the bathroom being the chipper handyman. When they returned, a plumber was there cleaning up the mess, and I was at the hospital getting the gash in my arm stitched.

HGTV has been called a confluence of ideas. I’m sure that’s true, but I couldn’t care less. I’m in it for the tranquillity and its sense of orderliness and proportion that you don’t find in the vast, troubled universe that surrounds it.

Has the cosmos grown too complex and frustrating for your delicate noodle? Is much of TV looking and sounding less and less coherent? Are you being Starred, Tripped, Lewinskyed, Cokied, Koppeled and Wolf Blitzered all the way to the rubber room?

So use that remote, dummy.

If you do, your head will clear. As someone was saying on HGTV recently: “Think pink. That’s what we really want to do today.”

While everything outside continues careening, in the temperate, contained biosphere of HGTV everything fits, everything works. Changing a toilet seat is not life-threatening. There are no warped joints or studs. Nails wouldn’t dare rust. What goes up never sags, bows or falls down. Everything that’s supposed to gleam does gleam. Everything meant to grow does grow. Nothing alive is overwatered or underfed. There are no foul-ups, nothing to assemble with screws that don’t coincide with the designated holes, no bad-ass attitudes to contend with.

While you had the evening news in your beam Wednesday night, I was vegging out with one of my HGTV favorites, “Interiors by Design,” where designer Stephanie Stokes was showing her Manhattan bedroom to tenaciously amiable host Chris Casson Madden. While floating, I seem to recall a dominant four-poster with a bedspread featuring blue hydrangea between fashionably unmatched end tables, and lots of closets.

“These are my closets for getting dressed,” Stokes explained, about the time Tom Brokaw was probably getting into President Clinton’s coming grand jury testimony. She also had a closet for her 60 pairs of shoes, tiny pull-out closets for her costume jewelry and a special closet for her evening dresses.

Later, I asked my wife if she had enough room in our bedroom closet for her evening dresses. Her silence meant either that she didn’t hear me or didn’t grasp my savage wit.

Madden also tackles “design dilemmas,” like the one facing a woman whose approach to seating 18 in her London Palladium of a dining room was to add a third table. “And finally,” Madden threw in later for those of us who cared, “add a durable dining room floor so entertaining is less worrisome.”

Right after you redecorate your heliport.

HGTV is not snobby, and has budget and lower-end decorating and redo shows, too. But I believe in dreaming big, even though the stuff they’re redoing or tossing out is usually swankier than what we now own.

It’s true this isn’t the only thick slab of no-stress TV available. The Discovery Channel, for example, has a daytime schedule similar to HGTV’s, and its biggest star, Lynette Jennings, is a sort of Martha Stewart-lite. The problem is that just as Jennings is attaching grommets to her newly upholstered kitchen stools, the serenity may be shattered by a promo for Discovery’s prime-time schedule (“Tonight starts Shark Week!”).

This may sound like escaping to HGTV equals brain atrophy and full flight from reality. Not true at all. Since becoming addicted to HGTV, I’ve been thinking more than ever.

Thinking pink.