Are you being served?

TV REVIEW:
Mary Portas:Secret Shopper Channel 4, Wednesday At Your ServiceRTÉ1, Sunday My Big Fat Gypsy WeddingChannel 4, Tuesday Ruby and the DukeRTÉ1, Tuesday

WHAT WITH December’s heating bills coming in the door and savage tax-credit cuts decimating this month’s pay packets, a programme about shopping falls firmly into the fanciful category usually occupied by exotic-holiday shows or anything presented by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. Wandering around a clothes shop and picking up a top just because you half fancy something new is about as likely to happen as going scuba diving in the Caribbean or covering the living room wall with flock paper.

Still, though, the retail guru Mary Portas has a point: if you're going to spend your hard-earned money – even if it's in the cheapest clothes shop – you deserve top service. For Mary Portas: Secret Shopper, her new series, the fabulous Portas is aiming to improve service standards – or "the way we are not being served" – and if that means going undercover in a dodgy brown wig and (this has to have hurt such a serious fashionista) last season's clothes, then so be it.

The first programme looked at high-street retailers flogging fast fashion. She went undercover in Primark (known as Penneys here), HM and the like, and found long queues at the till and surly or bored staff having a grand time talking to each other – the usual stuff.

“They’re not trained . . . It’s no good blaming the staff; it comes from the top,” she said before hunting down the boss of Pilot, a cheap and cheerless fashion chain. “Our stock has the life span of yogurt,” said boss Chris, who was all puffed up with I’m-a-plain-speaker-me sort of chat until he met Portas and discovered what a plain speaker really is.

Many snippy rows later, a few radical new ideas for how the shops do business and he was converted to her three golden rules: smile, speak and serve. “That’s no matter how busy or bored you are,” she cautioned the by-now enthusiastic staff in Pilot. “And if you don’t get good service, put your purse away,” she told viewers. It’s not rocket science, but, as always in her programmes, it’s the way she sells it that makes is seem fresh and new.

The most fun part was the “fash mob” of 30 or so Portas disciples who marched with her down Oxford Street and followed her into various fast fashion shops where they took off their coats to reveal T-shirts with “smile, speak and serve” written on them and started to help customers – until the security guards copped on and the police were called.

ON OUR OWNbusiness makeover show, At Your Service, the Brennan brothers, Francis and John, were on Valentia Island, at the magnificent-looking (from a distance, anyway) Royal Valentia hotel. Up close it was a different matter.

Francis Brennan, a man who is so dapper and tailored that I bet he’d run screaming out of Penneys, can smell damp from 50 paces, and his busy grey eyebrows are so animated they deserve their own screen credit.

For last week’s programme, the first in the second series, the duo took on the transformation of a traditional B&B, beginning with a bit of faffing around about which way the toilet rolls should face. “Details, details,” chirped Francis. The transformation – and the programme – worked.

This week, however, was a very flat, slightly odd affair, because it was hard to believe that the owners, siblings Vincent and Fiona Kidd, really had their hearts in it – though Vincent was considerably more enthusiastic than his sister, who could have done with a bossy Mary Portas stomping through the place in her trademark high heels with her smile-and-speak mantra.

The biggest thing the owners had done since buying the place five years ago was spend €100,000 on plans for a massive leisure and apartment complex; as the recession had put a stop to that flash gallop they had to go back to basics and try to make the place work. The Brennans, though clearly a little exasperated with their subjects, were too kind to really put the boot in, and the changes they made were minimal and fairly obvious.

It’s usual in these sort of makeover programmes to go back a few weeks later, to see if the transformation is still working; the cameras went back, but the Brennans didn’t. I couldn’t blame them.

LAST YEAR, when Channel 4's Cutting Edgedocumentary strand trained its cameras on Traveller weddings, it hit on such a rich seam of cultural mores and big dresses that it has gone back for more. This week My Big Fat Gypsy Weddingfilmed the run-up to 17-year-old Josie's big day in west London. Henry McKean has covered the same territory for TV3, but his documentary The Truth about Travellerswas superior to this one because he spent time talking to the girls and their parents and genuinely tried to get a handle on elements of the Traveller culture that are so baffling in a society that values education and equality.

This Channel 4 offering was as detached as a nature documentary – complete with soft-voiced commentary – happy not to question too deeply but to let the camera be dazzled by the plumage, the vivid bridesmaid’s dresses and the bride’s gown, which weighed 30kg and was the size of a small family car. “The more bleeds, the better the dress,” explained Josie, resigned to the scars the massive piece of tulle engineering was going to leave on her tiny frame.

Josie left school at 11 to help look after her eight siblings. “She’s a good cook and cleans up for most of the day,” said her fiance, Swanley, explaining her suitability as a wife. The girls’ big hair, skimpy bra tops and tiny shorts were at complete variance with their no-sex-before-marriage, no-alcohol, no-mixing-with-outsiders way of living. “I thought they looked like prostitutes,” said Josie’s dressmaker, possibly biting off the obviously wealthy hand that’s feeding her.

“Grabbing”, the Traveller courtship ritual, was explained by sweet, innocent 15-year-old Cheyenne. “The boys take the girl off, twist your harm to hurt you until you give them a kiss.” Cheyenne saw nothing sinister in this: she said “it means they like a girl”. Asked about her ideal husband, one of her criteria was “that he doesn’t beat you”. Even the biggest meringue wedding dress couldn’t sweeten that view of marriage.

Gem of a girl The story of Ireland’s first teenage pop star – and it wasn’t Dana

Heard of Ruby Murray? Me neither – before last Monday, anyway. Like the singer Brian Kennedy, who was interviewed in Ruby and the Duke, I thought it was just made-up rhyming slang for a curry. In this fascinating, comprehensive and superbly made documentary (by the director Michael Beattie), the singer – and here presenter – Duke Special told her tragic story through a mixture of interviews and old footage, with a few of his own performances added in.

Born in Belfast, Murray was the first Irish pop star, who at 19 had five songs in the UK top 20 – a feat that’s never been beaten. According to the pop pundit Paul Gambaccini, Murray was “in the right place at the right time”. TV was just taking off in the early 1950s, and she was on it all the time, singing her gentle romantic ballads. She was huge, playing the Palladium and summer seasons in Blackpool with Tommy Cooper, drawing huge crowds wherever she went; her secret wedding made headlines.

And then, in 1955, Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clockarrived, followed a year later by Elvis – and rock'n'roll killed her career stone dead. She performed right up to the 1990s, but the world that made her popular was long gone, and her slide into obscurity and alcoholism destroyed her marriage and her family.

Duke Special approached her story from a performer’s point of view, understanding her need for her audience, her sense of loss when it was gone, and how Tin Pan alley, the great pop machine, used her and then moved on to the next big thing.