Mary Portas: Secret Shopper, Channel 4

She’s back: the retail guru and style icon, with her sharp red bob, sharper tongue and enviable sense of style. In two series of Mary, Queen of Shops on BBC Two, she whipped ailing businesses into shape and established herself as one of television’s most striking and engaging personalities. If online message boards are to be believed, she also – thanks to her much-discussed mid-life divorce, relationship with Grazia fashion editor Melanie Rickey and sexy combination of attitude, intelligence and eye-catching elegance – inspired happily married women up and down the land to fantasise about enjoying a sapphic interlude with her.

Now she’s moved to Channel 4, and in her new show she’s setting out to skewer the high-street perpetrators of Britain’s notoriously bad service. Aptly attired in military chic, she’s ready for battle. “The revolution starts here,” she proclaims with characteristic chutzpah.

The first programme in the series focused on disposable fashion, and in truth Portas’s revolution started small. She tackled relative chain-store newcomers Pilot; and while she hoped that what she achieved with the company would have a knock-on effect on the “fatter cats”, it would have been nice to have seen her take on one of the real Big Boys. Still, as a preliminary, she did ditch her designer gear for the "secret shopper" part of the mission, donning an unflattering brown wig and a school-run mum outfit for a spot of undercover filming in some well-known stores.