For once — just once — Mike Rowe is clean.
He’s sitting at a lunch table in a somewhat unlikely location: a recycling center on San Francisco’s rugged southeastern fringe, not your average place for a picnic but nicer than most of the holes where he’s usually found.
The problem is Rowe’s occupation. Or occupations, as the case may be. For the last three years he has been the host of “Dirty Jobs,” the gross-out cable hit on the Discovery Channel, a gig that has exposed him to untold tons of sludge, sewage, mud, manure, detritus, excreta, road kill and plain old nastiness.
Worse yet, he seems to enjoy it.
“TV does a bad job of portraying common people,” he said as recycling workers drove by with forklifts hauling giant bricks of crushed cans. “By and large they are either turned into heroes, with a lot of dramatic cello music behind everyday activities, or they are reduced to these punch lines.
“My idea was if I really tried to do the work — really, really tried — and not be afraid to fail or look bad next to the person who’s actually made a career of this, then in the end when the dust settles we’ll have this situation where the viewer can determine how difficult the job is on their own and determine how gifted the actual worker is.”
Eddie Barbini, an executive producer of the show, said Rowe’s appeal was his ability to be, well, normal.
“There are no spokespersons for the working man out there,” Barbini said. “But Mike is that guy.”
Among the workers Rowe has toiled beside are a skull cleaner (think elk), shark tagger and something called a worm poop rancher.
All told Rowe has tried more than 100 dirty jobs — usually three an episode — with his 150th, as a yak farmer, due on an October show. You can see two episodes of jobs beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Along the way, Rowe says, he has broken two toes, one finger, two ribs and slipped a disk. Now 45, he has had injections for most every water-borne disease around and a couple of extra shots as well. Which ones?
More Top Picks Best Money Clips For Men
“Rye, whiskey and scotch is always good,” he said.
Some of the typical occupational hazards he faces were in evidence on an episode in which he descended into the underbelly of San Francisco with a sewer inspector. Once there he squatted ankle deep in waste water, was doused with an unidentified liquid and watched as many cockroaches scrambled along the walls and in one case, into his jumpsuit. There also were rats.
“Normally this is the part where I’d look into the camera and say something pithy and somewhat amusing, and memorable,” Rowe said, upon emerging from the underworld, looking winded and genuinely relieved. “I got nothing.”
A large part of the popularity of “Dirty Jobs” comes from Rowe’s ability to crack wise on cue, a talent he says he learned while toiling in another type of diamond mine: the QVC shopping network, where he worked for three years in the mid-1990s, cutting his teeth as a jewelry pitchman.
But life as an itinerant job-attempter suits him best, Rowe said. He always has had a problem with commitment: He is single, though he lives with his longtime girlfriend in San Francisco.
“My promise is we’ll get dirty, we’ll have a few laughs, and maybe well learn something,” he said. “And then, most importantly, I’m leaving.”