How To Look Good Naked…

I’m in love with a gay man from Leicester. At least I think he’s gay as he’s as camp as several row of tents in a tent warehouse in a town called tentsville and he knows how to look fantastic in clothes I can’t even pronounce let alone think about wearing.

But to be honest it’s so hard to tell these days. It was OK in the Seventies when we only had John Inman on telly. It was easy then but in this era of gender-bending it’s just so confusing. I blame Boy George. Or George Michael. Or George Bush. Well, he could be…

However the sexuality of my new love is neither here nor there (although if a straight fellla manhandled women the way he does it would constitute rape and not fashion advice). What matters most is that I am in love with him and I want him to come round and give me a good seeing to.

Sadly I don’t think he ever will as I quite like my body and I’m not a woman so his mission doesn’t include me.

I am, of course, talking about the wonderful Gok Wan, fashion stylist to the stars and presenter of How To Look Good Naked. In this series, he meets women who hate their bodies and, by giving them a few style tips and helping rebuild their ebbing confidence, he teaches them to love their body and quite often love themselves a bit more.

It sounds really horrible, like some awful retread of a format previously pioneered by Gillian McKeith with food or that fashion Nazi Nicky Hambleton-Jones with plastic surgery or those two shockingly terrible posh birds Trinny and Susannah with clothes.

But the difference between Gok and those truly horrible people is that he genuinely cares about his subjects and so the show is actually about them rather than about him. And it works brilliantly.

Last night’s episode featured hippy earth mother Lisa Mayall. She didn’t like the way she looked and hid her body away. Apparently nobody had seen her naked for three years. But enter Gok with his bag of tricks and by the end of the show she posing naked and walking down a catwalk in underwear.

This sort of telly can be really terrible. It can be about promoting the brand a presenter (McKeith), showing off how clever a presenter is (Hambleton-Jones) or just giving airtime to posh idiots who in any other walk of life but telly would be booted out onto the street and told to get a proper job (Trinny annd Susannah).

But How To Look Good Naked works because it is about the subject and not about the presenter – and that’s why its presenter comes out of it looking better than any of the rather fab outfits he cobbles together.

Gok for president!