TV review: Shopgirls

Doctor with a cure for Victorian attitude.

Having become disillusioned with teaching, my fiancee is looking for a new career. A creative woman, one of the ideas she’s toying with is opening an arts and craft shop on our local high street.

Having watched nine series of The Apprentice, I’ve been on hand to offer advice particularly that she needs to compare herself to a predatory animal if she’s going to get ahead in business.

At no point have I called her “a romantic freak” for thinking she can work in a shop.

But that was the headline which ran in The Glasgow Herald in 1841 over a story about a 16-year-old girl who’d disguised herself as a man to be able to work behind a counter in a Glasgow store.

Just to make us aware how much our morals should be outraged, the revelation she was of a “feminine” persuasion was written in italics.

This was just one of many startling snippets thrown up by Dr Pamela Cox’s superbly researched look at the career of the shopgirl.

Despite presenting a similar series, Servants: The True Story of Life Below Stairs, in 2012, Dr Cox looked like she’d never seen a TV camera before as she introduced herself in George Square (“women presenting television programmes,” I thought to myself, “whatever next?”) but she warmed to her task to become a more than able conduit of Victorian Britain’s irrational views on working women.

I had to fight to return my eyebrows to their neutral position after she told us that it was once put forward that women standing behind a shop counter would mean an end to the human race (the damage caused to the pelvis would hinder their ability to carry children).

But that was of nothing to the facial hair movements of Trevor Picketts, a purveyor of “fancy goods” in London’s exclusive Burlington Arcade, when Pamela politely suggested that his shop was once used as a cover for prostitutes.

“That’s rather blunt,” he said, coming over all Russell Grant. “I prefer ‘implied their wares.’”

I guess being creative is essential whether you’re selling arts and crafts or fancy goods.

Shopgirls: The True Story Of Life Behind The Counter. BBC2, Tuesday.