Mary Queen of Shops

Mary Portas is the retail display guru credited with rescuing Harvey Nichols and she belongs to the following WIkipedia categories: 1962 births, Living people, People from Rickmansworth, Bisexual people, LGBT people from England, British businesspeople in retailing, English journalists and English non-fiction writers

Her reality TV show is great stuff: a version of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares for boutiques (with less swearing). Like all the best reality TV it’s got all the elements of the folk tale in the right order and winds up nicely through conflict (the shopkeeper is usually a bit of a berk so there’s plenty of potential for a fight) to a narrative climax followed by a really satisfying resolution (with some learning and some tears).

Peter Bazalgette, boss of the firm that makes the British version of Big Brother and member of the following Wikipedia categories: Alumni of the University of Cambridge, British television executives, Living people, Old Alleynians, Alumni of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, Presidents of the Cambridge Union Society, Year of birth missing (living people), was on the TV the other day saying that all those people who whinge on about reality TV are just going to have to get used to it: reality is just one of the ways in which we make TV now. Mary Queen of Shops is first class entertainment and proof that he’s dead right.