Mary Queen Of Shops (BBC2) returned for a new series with a frosty message for the armchair consumer. "We'll miss our neighbourhood shops when they're gone," warned Mary Portas, clattering towards us in tights the colour of chilblains, her statement pendants swinging to a newly parsimonious beat.
After two series focusing on boutique mismanagement, and one that aimed to remedy charity store botch-ups, this latest series sets the retail troubleshooter loose on local shopkeepers. The opening episode would focus, we were promised, on the "humble high-street baker". The outlook was appallingly gloomy. A third of UK bakeries have closed "in the last two years alone". The supermarket has "killed the bread trade", the local baker's cheery white hat flattened like a bloodied pancake beneath the fists of Messrs Morrison, Sainsbury and their cackling brethren.
Given Portas's previous successes, we were primed for another tale of heroism: of David squaring up to Goliath, of candour, pluck and graft triumphing over commercial muscle. But then Angela Maher strode in and your spirits sank.
If there has ever been a TV makeover candidate less open to suggestion, I have yet to see her. "I don't care what you say," she snapped as Portas attempted to point out that her monstrous smiley-face biscuits might be a bit off-putting to the modern cookie connoisseur. "I know about this trade!" But her Raynes Park shop, Maher and Sons, was stuffed: profits had halved in the last five years and customers were defecting to Asda in their droves. Peering around the spoils of Maher's 36-year-old business ? the lacquered pine fittings, the unloved mountain range of slapdash jam tarts, desultory pastries, malformed gingerbread women ("Don't touch them!") and pastries that resembled steamrollered offal ? it was difficult to blame them.
But Maher wasn't interested in advice, or compromise. Would Maher consider replacing the knackered pine with fresh linen and wicker baskets? No. Would she switch the hell-biscuits for artisan cupcakes? "You don't know what you're talking about, dear." There was a standoff. Arms were folded. Eyes were rolled. It was granary cobs at dawn. So why, then, had Maher bothered to approach the programme-makers? Nobody seemed to know. If there was an answer, the women were too busy clicking their tongues at each other to let us hear it. In the end, a weary acceptance descended on the battleground. "I don't want any unpleasantness," said Maher, exhausted. "I just want you to leave me alone." Portas sighed and shrugged. "My job was to make the business more profitable. I haven't done that. That's the exam failed." The makeover may have flopped, but from the ashes of disaster rose one of the oddest and most gripping documentaries of the year. Extraordinary