Do you remember Mary Queen of Shops? You know, the show in which retail guru Mary Portas, who looks like a ginger Mary Quant in slightly too young clothes, goes in to save failing boutiques?
Well last night we watched the first episode of her new series Mary Queen of Charity Shops. It was great.
I'm a huge fan of charity shops, and I've been in and out of them since I was a teenager. War On Want, The Spastics Society, Guide Dogs For the Blind, etc., once for skinny ties and old overcoats and then concentrating mainly - and still to this day - on old records, CDs and DVDs. You can find all sorts of bargains which you can then either keep or more likely pop on eBay. I once sold a Nigerian James Brown single for £45. There's a rare gem to found among the endless copies of Paul Young's No Parlez or Make The Party Last.
It all depends how good they are of course, on the area. This is what came across in the show. The better the area, the better the junk, though it's hard to come by.
These places are always staffed by old biddies who are either sweet or plain mean or a bit bonkers or all three. There was a woman in the very good Winchester Oxfam Books & Music shop who, whenever you presented your purchase to her would remark that 'it was the first record I ever bought' or 'the first book I ever read'. Clearly it's all lies but she meant well. She's still there too.
The women in the programme had done variously between five and 46 years. There were hundreds of them operating out of one shop and it was a total non-money-making disaster, with a hapless regional manager and no shop manager. Mary works her magic. Or does she. I'll say no more because you'll want to see it for yourselves.
Needless to say, some of the rubbish they had dumped on the doorstep was an insult. Used nappies, bags of old underwear, complete with sanitary towels and the worst bric-a-brac that even people at car boot sales would baulk at. All the time you're watching that charity shop smell lingers in the air too. Can you smell it?
Are you a charity shop fan?
