HE'S everywhere at the moment. On the sides of buses, on bus shelters, on roadside hoardings, and on every magazine cover and telly show – and as always he's the absolute embodiment of old-style masculinity: broad of chest, bulging of biceps, virile
of gun. That's James Bond, of course. But someone else who's everywhere at the moment is Gok Wan.
Every week, the skinniest man there's ever been pops up with something new. New silly specs, new take on the classic Flock of Seagulls split-level haircut, new show. Actually, he doesn't; it only seems that way. But look at your TV with half-shut eyes and it could be Gok you see, even when it's really Jeremy Paxman or Simon Cowell or the great man himself, Ross Kemp.
For those who don't have access to Channel Gok (previously Channel 4), Gok makes women feel good about themselves by stripping off in front of him. James Bond does this too, although when he started out, some women stayed determinedly buttoned up and donned an extra heavy-duty cardie for good measure. These women complained that Bond was sexist and demeaning to their kind. But Gok doesn't upset the feminists. I've never met a woman who doesn't like him.
Miss Naked Beauty is certainly the third Gok show this year, though it could easily be the 87th. I missed his all-male makeover special, Get Your Goks Out!, and its follow-up Drop 'Em John! aimed at Messrs Snow, McCririck, Francombe and other Channel Gok personnel answering to the name. But those who saw them tell me they were telly gold.
A Gok show has a signature shot. It's our man in a shopping mall, rounding up recruits, usually women, to a Scissors Sisters soundtrack. Even I remember him doing this in How To Look Good Naked and Gok's Fashion Fix, and I'm not an avid watcher. Sure enough, he was at it again at the start of Miss Naked Beauty.
My army analogy only takes me so far with Gok; on the battlefield you suspect he'd be a bit, well, wan – even if out of all the women in his force, he'd look the best in camouflage hot pants. But Miss Naked Beauty is Gok on as near as he'll probably get to a war footing. "Beauty is owned by an industry that dictates what we define as good-looking," he declared before launching his counter-offensive and the six-week search for the woman who would be its figurehead: an alternative pageant queen able to "rally against the fake and the unachievable and lobby for 100% real".
Among the participants who considered themselves naturally beautiful was Amy, 23, who is just 4ft 8ins tall but insisted: "No matter how many times people put me down, I hold my head high." Jo, 23, revealed that a spine condition left her with a sticky-out bottom which causes her to walk like a duck, but the ever-supportive Gok quipped: "Girlfriend, they'd pay for one of those asses in LA!" It's easy to send up old-fangled beauty contests and Miss Naked Beauty did this, though it's a long time since tiara-and-sash supremo Eric Morley announced results in reverse order. It's also easy to take a pop at "beauty fascism", as Gok put it. But when other entrants in this competition confessed to being made to feel fat, pale or ordinary when they were nothing of the sort, the programme began to make some sense. Gok never judges; that's why women love him. He's judging here, of course, but even those who didn't make the final cut seemed to gain something from the experience – and, in a radical departure from the reality-show norm, no one cried. Yes, they love him: he can march straight up to a woman and cop a feel of her "bangers". Not even James Bond – old-school version – could get away with that.
By now, the respectable and the well educated shouldn't need telling that heroin is no respecter of class. Mum, Heroin And Me hammered the point home, though, as Jane Treays' documentary followed a harrowing year in the life of Hannah, 20, who sleeps rough a short distance from her mother Kate's beautiful house in Brighton, all the time craving the next hit.
Sometimes Kate helps her get it. In the most depressing sequence, she paid for Hannah to have a massage and a haircut on her 21st birthday rather than give her anything which could be sold for drugs – but between appointments was forced to drive to a garage forecourt and hand over £10 for Hannah's "gear". During the period covered by the film, Hannah injected 730 times at a cost of £10,000. Kate often goes on these nocturnal assignations, she revealed, to keep her daughter safe. Then the next morning she's back to work as an interior designer.
An unhappy, sickly and bullied child, Hannah was introduced to drugs by a boyfriend – not the one featured in the documentary, although he's an addict, too. Kate allowed them to live together in the family home until he stole a TV set. Hannah won't undergo rehab while he's around and Kate sometimes fears that only death will separate them. But at other times she tries to stay optimistic about a happy resolution. You might have wished that Hannah's father Robert had not declined to take part because his "tough love" stance may have proved revealing. But you couldn't fail to be impressed by this mother's absolutely unconditional love.
The Story Of The Guitar ended as it began, with more fantastic archive footage, including the teenage Jimmy Page bashing out a skiffle beat for a harrumphing Huw Weldon and then revealing that he thought his future lay in biological research. Alan Yentob fronted this series in no less square a manner than Weldon, half a century before, and in his hands, a phrase like "raw guitar chaos" didn't sound very raw or especially chaotic. But, while I was glad he didn't probe the guitar's phallic connotations too deeply, our host couldn't spoil my enjoyment of the Led Zeppelin axeman and others revealing the secrets of their greatest riffs.
