Not even the latest TV bully will stop the relentless advance of big chains
Mary, Queen of Shops BBC2
Why aren't audiences fed up with the TV bully? Trinny and Susannah, Gillian McKeith, Kim and Aggie (in case you've been living in Ulan Bator, these two are big into cleaning): I'm sick to death of the way that they whirl into ordinary people's lives, dangle the carrot and wave the stick, and then swan off again, reassured that they've transformed another life. I guess it's their use of the lexicon of 21st-century self-improvement ("comfort zone", "positive energy", "in a good place") without any embarrassment that really gets to me. For one thing, such language is ickily self-indulgent. For another, it sits rather oddly with their veneration of humiliation and shame as catalysts for change.
But what do I know? A new recruit has recently joined their ranks - and the BBC, to which she has signed, couldn't be more excited. Trailers, breathless press releases, tie-in books . . . any day now, her cellulite will appear on the cover of Heat magazine.
Not that she has cellulite, of course. Mary Portas, star of Mary, Queen of Shops (31 May, 9pm), is a retail fashion guru, and they don't have wobbly bits. The BBC, still coy about advertising, even after all the publicity for Amstrad provided by The Apprentice, will not say for whom she's worked her magic in the past, but I am happy to reveal that she is a former marketing director of Harvey Nichols who has also done campaigns for Clarks, Oasis and Kangol. In this series, brought to you by Pat Llewellyn, the producer who gave us Gordon Ramsay, Portas sets out to help struggling boutiques to survive on high streets dominated by chains. She is, apparently, very concerned that small shops are disappearing - a thousand of them close every year - which is a bit ironic, given that she made her name helping some fairly big players to get even bigger. Oh, well. Jamie Oliver still does ads for Sainsbury's, and everyone thinks he's a saint. And Portas does know her onions - or, at least, her handbags, footless tights and directional waistcoats.
Directional. Another word I loathe. Fashion types love it, even though it means nothing more than superhip. Portas, needless to say, is totally directional. She's a walking, talking one-way sign and, I admit, she looks good on it - a Mary Quant for the Facebook generation (though she should be careful on the waistcoat front; only one woman can get away with wearing waistcoats and not look as if she's channelling Chas and Dave, and that's Kate Moss). Her first task was to turn round the fortunes of Ju-Ju in Brighton, which was big on tat and low on sales; Tim and Soley, the owners, were losing £700 a week. But how? Easy! New stock and changing rooms, plus a few T-shirts with smiley faces on them, the better to attract the right fashion "tribe", by which, in this case, she meant the kinds of people who look at a perfectly loony lime-and-silver chain-mail top with giant hood and think: "I must have it!" rather than "Do I look like I'm about to revive Pan's People?" Portas nagged and waved her directional bangles around; the owners obligingly sobbed.
To say that this show is formulaic is like saying that Primark is cheap. And your point is? The British viewer likes formulaic, just as the British shopper likes cheap.
Portas is divine, a genuine discovery. "Their shop is so dark, they're considering hanging upside down in it, like bats," she said at one point. But her series is tatty, both in its predictability and in its assumptions. Its premise rests on the belief that our fixation with shopping - with buying ever more stuff that we don't really need - is inherently a good thing, a potential source of happiness. But our ravenous consumerism is more complicated than that, as Andrew Marr is busy attempting to show in his History of Modern Britain (Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC2). And not even Portas, with her dagger heels and knuckleduster rings, can put an end to greedy landlords offering their leases to rapacious chains. Oh, dear. I know I sound like a killjoy and, now I think of it, I'm wondering . . . That little Ju-Ju dress, the one with the flowers. Is it available by mail order?
Pick of the week
Lie Lab
2 June, 7pm, Channel 4
Three former Guantanamo detainees take lie-detector tests.
Beryl's Last Year
2 June, 9pm, BBC4
Novelist Bainbridge, as seen by her grandson Charlie Russell.
The True Story of Che Guevara
8 June, 9pm, History Channel
Che's biographer Jon Lee Anderson looks at the life of the legend.
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