Mary Portas ... she's no dummy. Photograph: Optomen TV/BBC
Apologies if you're fed up of reading about Mary Portas, Her Royal Highness of Shops, but seriously, good fashion telly rarely happens, so when it does it is worth banging on about.
The second series ended last night with Mary revisiting a couple of shops she'd helped in the last series to see whether they'd taken on board what she said a year on, because Mary is just so bossy and three-steps ahead of the rest of us that she couldn't bear to end the series without pre-empting a discussion about how effective her changes actually were. Ju-Ju in Brighton hadn't followed the Mary path to retail enlightenment and suffered as a result, while Seen in Doncaster had, to great success. It was a little bit grating and self-satisfied, but upbeat and warm too - the perfect end to the series run.
What has been great about the show is that it didn't become cult immediately. It wasn't hyped to death in the first series, but somewhere a couple of episodes into this season it exploded into the sort of TV during which some of my friends (OK, those in the fashion industry) banned me from texting them. It's hard to say why this happened, but my guess is that it had something to do with the joy of watching the winning weekly formula of all-knowing Mary benevolently sharing drops of her retail genius with the misguided but keen independent store owners, culminating in a champagne fuelled successful re-opening night.
What is new about this is that we get to see another side of the fashion industry - the business side. Too often fashion on TV gets sidelined into either a therapy tool or a silly pastime for women with neither soul nor ambition. So it is particularly pleasing to see Mary take fashion seriously, and present the hard business reasons as to why and how retail works, or doesn't. Particularly when she is always so reassuringly right.
Usually high street chains have no interesting human face, and so profits and loss just aren't interesting when they are just a set of figures on the business pages of a newspaper whereas with Mary's quarry - the independent retailer - we get the full human story behind a failing store. And we share the warm feeling when there's the suggestion that the owners are going to turn around their business after Mary has waved her retail wand over it.
But the standout reason why MQoS has worked so well is of course Mary Portas herself. With her crispy white shirts, spiked ankle boots, statement Marni jewellery, narrowing eyes and spiky claw hands constantly swiping through the air, Mary has transformed herself into a cartoon fashionista. She's tough, wears edgy clothes, doesn't apologise for liking fashion and has a bob that you just know needs serious upkeep. But unlike other cartoon fashionistas, she's likable and is no fashion snob. Mary would never dream of patronising the shopkeepers and would never sneer at the fashion tastes of their customers - well, in public at least.
