TV review: Mary Portas: Save Our Shops

Published on Tuesday 23 June 2009 19:24

MARY PORTAS: SAVE OUR SHOPS, BBC2

HAVING "saved" charity shops, by dint of snapping at old ladies and spluttering outrage at the grotty donations, Mary Portas is now ambitiously aiming to save all shops. With a worldwide recession, that seems like a pretty daunting job, even for the fearsomely confident Portas.

And this programme had some chilling statistics that would have put off a lesser woman.

We've all noticed the loss of some major chains – Woolworths, Zavvi, MFI and so on – but thousands of smaller shops have closed over the past six months, too, leaving 67,000 workers looking for new jobs. And it is predicted that 35,000 more shops could close by the end of this year.

It's undeniable that we've been living through a dazed age of consumerism, where people have bought without thinking, or needing, and, as someone who goes to ridiculous lengths to avoid shopping, I admit I've often thought it dominated our culture far too much: do we really need all this new stuff? Yet I'd never realised just what the impact of these closures will be: one in six people in Britain, Portas explained, is employed in some aspect of the retail industry.

And it wasn't just a theoretical numbers game. Visiting the town of Dunstable, near where she grew up, a local worthy showed her a plan of the shopping streets, crossing off all the stores that had closed recently. It went on for ages, the map becoming a graveyard of black crosses. Wandering around, the only two Portas could find open were an Afro-Caribbean hair products shop (running at a loss, because the owner was still liable for the rent anyway) and a sleazy place selling leather underwear and sex videos. Portas hardly needed to point out that these two were hardly going to bring anyone into town to shop, unless they had very specific needs.

Dunstable, presumably, was too far gone for Portas's crusade, so she took it to Tewkesbury, a pretty place whose centre was also slipping into a ghost town of boarded-up shopfronts. Her plan was to draw the town's shopkeepers together in joint promotions and encourage the 89 per cent of local people who didn't do their shopping there to return.

Although Save Our Shops seemed much like an instalment of Portas's usual Queen Of Shops series, it was actually a Money Programme report, focusing more on the financial side of the retail crisis than the makeover element, so the Tewkesbury plan seemed like a hastily thrown-in aside. The local shops, she told them, must work harder to draw people back, with more enticing, creative ideas – but all this seemed vague and, ultimately, too little too late, when huge out-of-town supermarkets are beating them at their own game. People are buying on price, rather than from habit.

There will always be shops, of course, but I wonder if there will always be Mary Portas programmes. Lately, she's seemed – much like the TV property experts – to be slightly flailing around for a new format that reflects the changing times. Although she's hard to like, with a manner so assured it often seems arrogant, she is undeniably a savvy character. Perhaps she could take over from the departing, sardonic Margaret as Sir Alan's assistant on The Apprentice – in fact, come to think of it, if Sugar can be brought into government, there seems no reason why Mary Portas couldn't be appointed Minister for Shops.