Katy Perry, Vic Reeves and Jools Holland

From comedian & writer Paul Kerensa:
I don’t know about you, but oddly being at home, I’ve seen more of other people’s homes than I used to. Musicians, journalists, comedians, vicars, fitness instructors (that’s exhausting, watching my kids exercise)... More domestic vloggers than ever. It’s like Through The Keyhole gone large. Behind whoever’s presenting, it’s either bookshelves – and I do like to browse their books – or the house’s whitest wall. Yet finding those perfect backgrounds can be tricky. I watched a church minister deliver an inspiring message, against his plainest wall – but in taking down pictures, he’d revealed hooks and peeling paintwork, which clearly bothered him. 
So he kept positioning his head to block out the blemishes, angling the camera to give a false, nicer impression. His quest for the purest cleanest background rather obstructed his message. Most of us aren’t presenting online, but we present ourselves, to our fellow humans. I’m sure we all worry what people think about us – what’s in our own backgrounds, our lives, our back stories. How we sound. Whether we’ve read the right books. Does our experience, or lack of it, show? A millennium-and-a-half ago, St Augustine wrote: “Trust the past to God’s mercy, the present to God’s love, and the future to God’s providence.” I suppose in other words, untarnished backgrounds are rare. 
Ask the home-based presenters looking for that perfect wall. To begin with, our lives may have been pure, blank canvases. But life adds dents, dints, hooks and nails: family photos, corkboards with unfinished to-do lists, blemishes on the paintwork. A literal example: There’s a mark on our staircase wall, from when I tried attaching the baby’s metal stairgate. I ended up throwing it, in a sleep-deprived outburst. A decade later, that dent’s still there: a reminder, whenever I pass, that was then, this is now. I’ve thrown nothing but the odd tantrum since. So I’ll do my best to think less of the background, and more of the person in front of me. Forget how many books someone’s read, or any dents on their backdrop. My background’s not whiter-than-white either. Forget the imperfections behind me... I’ve got imperfections ahead to think about.