The last time I bought anything to wear in a charity shop was 1985. I’d like to say this is because I am a ruthlessly pared-down aesthete who cannot be distracted from her streamlined path by superfluous temptations. But since I’m constantly distracted by superfluous temptations, I have to conclude it’s because the whole shopping-as-an-amazing-sensory-experience passed the charity sector by. But now Mary Portas – aka Mary Queen of Shops – is attempting to work her magic on them. Mary wants us all – not just students and the elderly – to buy more from charity shops, instead of simply using them as a repository for mangled Barbie dolls and discarded mug trees.

For the uninitiated, the Mary Queen of Shops series on BBC2 does for boutiques what Gordon Ramsay does for restaurants, but without threatening to f****** kill anyone.

She has been labouring on the charity project for six months now and the redoubtable ladies she’s come across at Mind, Save the Children, Help the Aged and Barnardo’s are, it turns out, far from the hopeless candidates who normally entertain viewers with their inability to run a bath, let alone a business. You should have seen Trisha Vangeens, manager of the North London Hospice Shop in Golders Green, working her neon yellow kinky boots (charity shop find, obviously) the day I met her. I don’t think Trisha will see 60 again. Same goes for her colleague, fag and tai chi addict Inge Garter. But both of them make being 70 look like the coolest thing.

If you watch the programme when it airs, you’ll see Trisha’s boots, along with the navy jacket she put me in and Peaches Geldof’s orange dress, because as part of her mission to sex up the charity shop image, Mary took the ladies to London Fashion Week, where they styled some fashion editors, models and girls about town in charity finds.

It’s a nice little jacket with grey felt contrast trim – a bit big, but good quality and worth getting altered. But the more serious challenge of getting us all to shop and not just dump is the real battle. Mary runs a successful fashion consultancy, so she knows what she’s doing. But charity shops are only as good as the stuff they get given. You won’t believe some of the rubbish people off-load but according to Inge and Trisha, they see lots of dirty underwear, which is stretching the notion of altruism.

It’s all very timely, what with the economy, the environment and Primark ennui (Oxfam drafted in Jane Shepherdson a year ago, after all). It’s also likely that more empty sites will be taken over by charity shops. I hope Mary makes them easier to navigate. I’d like to see them merchandised like normal shops, by colour or by item. I don’t want to battle past mug trees. And I’d like them not to have that funny charity shop whiff. Presumably we could help there by ensuring what we give is pristine. It’s not just down to the Inges and Trishas to make these places work. We get the charity shops we deserve.

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