Mary Portas: Secret Shopper

Scary Mary is back – scruffy shopkeepers out there beware
Ben-Felsenburg-portrait-176Deployed against failing shops as the ultimate weapon of consumer vengeance, Mary Portas rather calls to mind the moment Wellington said of his own troops, ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God they terrify me.’ Standing ramrod straight and coolly self-possessed, she projects her unreservedly forthright opinions with a verbal onslaught akin to the cruel screech of chalk across a blackboard.

Her returning series (Mary Portas: Secret Shopper, Channel 4, Tuesday at 8pm) opens with the case of a local shop in the Buckinghamshire village of Burnham. No one’s been murdered, but the litany of misdemeanours at Hallmark Foods will draw a despairing sigh of recognition from anyone who’s gone shopping in Britain in the past 20 years: the staff shout and swear, read the paper at the till oblivious to the shoppers and constantly pop outside for cigarette breaks, while the shelves are thick with goods dangerously past their sell-by date.

Who’s to blame? Is it avuncular owner Keshu, who seems oblivious to what’s going on? Or Dean, the likely lad he decided had just the qualities to be shop manager? ‘The customer is never right,’ Dean confides, before hidden cameras capture him betraying Keshu’s affectionate regard when he maligns his boss as a ‘cheeky bitch’. Not since Bernie Madoff got rich have we seen such a level of misplaced trust. Cue a one-megaton strike by la Portas. Dean and the gang will never know what hit them.

NOT TO BE MISSED


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