By 47, Carole Ward’s genetic legacy was written on her face. She’d inherited her father’s wrinkles and her mother’s turkey wattle neck. Yet neither concerned her unduly. “My best friend lost two stone and I didn’t even notice,” she says cheerfully. “I don’t pay much attention to how people look.”

But her friends at work did. They suggested that Ward apply to the Channel 4 makeover programme 10 Years Younger. “I thought, ‘let’s give it a go’. I was looking for a bit of ‘me time’ after the last few years.” By which she means her husband finding out that he had a terminal illness just as they were about to separate. He died two years ago and now she has a new partner, Alan.

Ward, a data protection officer from Caterham, Surrey, was accepted for the show and took a 10YY poll in which she was taken into the street and random strangers were asked to guess her age. “The average came out as 53,” she says. “I didn’t think that was too bad.”

Next Ward was introduced to a team of experts: Nicky Hambleton-Jones, the programme’s presenter responsible for pepping up her wardrobe; a make-up artist; a hairdresser; a cosmetic dentist; and a plastic surgeon who would give Ward a browlift, a lower-face lift to cut away that wattle neck and snip skin off her upper lids to “open up” her eyes.

Viewers of 10 Years Younger are given the impression that plastic surgery is no more drastic than a haircut. The pain, recovery time and scars, the possibility of surgery going wrong, even fatally, are hardly mentioned. This, according to the president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, Chris Khoo, is “utterly irresponsible”.

“The programme treats people’s bodies like rooms that just need a designer to restyle them,” he says. “But people are not just bodies, they are psyches, too. If you put a woman in front of ten strangers who all say that she looks old and dreadful, it would take a very strong-minded person then to turn down free surgery, which, she is told, will rectify that. Vulnerable and insecure people are at a huge disadvantage in making informed choices.”

It’s seven weeks since Ward’s surgery, but she’s still not herself. “I’m normally a really strong person,” she says. “But those operations knocked me for six. Maybe I’m being a bit of a blonde, but I’d no idea it was going to take me so long to recover. It’s been dreadful. I had to sleep upright for the first two-and-a-half weeks. Yesterday, when they put veneers on my teeth, I pleaded with the dentist ‘don’t hurt me’. I’d just had enough. I only let them do the top set.”

Ward pushes back her hair to reveal eight dark blue scars on her scalp and behind her ears. When she closes her eyes you can see incisions along her lids. Even so, if asked what her age is now, I’d guess around 47.

With all the “nasty bits” (as the director calls them) over, today Ward is hearing what Hambleton-Jones thinks of the black trousers and lilac cardigan she wears for work. Not that this process looks particularly pleasant. “I can’t believe you actually put this on!” cries Hambleton-Jones, a long, pale woman, with the sleekness and human warmth of an anaconda.

10 Years Younger is one of Channel 4’s top- rated shows. It is a milder version of the US transformation programmes Extreme Makeover and The Swan, which, by drastic full-body surgery, remould ordinary-looking women into “beauties”.

Originally, 10YY used any method short of surgery — diet, exercise, styling — to rejuvenate contestants. But in the second series, surgery was introduced and ratings went up. In series three, it is an even larger element. A forthcoming “bikini beach special” features Heather, a hospital administrator from Essex, who dropped from a size 20 to an 8 but was left with a haggard face, an “elephant ear” of loose flesh around her midriff, droopy breasts and a wrinkly bottom.

Dressed in a bikini, Heather is cruelly paraded down a beach. Or, as the voiceover puts it, “we put poor Heather’s decrepit old body” to be “slated before the cruel British public”. Estimates of her age average at 55 and Heather, aged 42, weeps onscreen. Top-to-toe surgery follows, including a facelift, tummy lift, eye-bag removal, cheeks injected with her own bum-fat, bottom lift, breast lift and implants. Later, Heather parades her body, again in a bikini, and is judged by those on the beach to be 42. She is overjoyed.

I ask Hambleton-Jones if Heather’s treatment wasn’t humiliating. “Would I stand on a beach in front of all those people? No. It’s hard. But at the same time you have to do that poll at the beginning and, if it’s a bikini special, she has to do it in a bikini. That wasn’t my idea. When I first heard the idea, I thought it was mad. I just do my job.”

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