I would imagine that good taste – or at least taste aligned to the predilections of your marketplace – is a tricky thing to acquire.
But in rescuing the home furnishings shop of a kitsch-loving hippy couple, retail queen Mary Portas proved that with enthusiasm and passion you can overcome most deficiencies. By the end of the BBC’s Mary Queen of Shops last night, the proprietors of Under the Moon, who at the outset were selling at boutique prices monstrosities barely worthy of car boot sales, were demonstrating a genuine flair for their trade.
“They might as well have ‘utter shite’ written above the door," said Mary Portas upon arriving at the Kingston Upon Thames-based emporium of tat. The proprietors, who were in their 60s and sartorially and psychologically still in the 70s, sold, among other things, glass perfume dispensers in the shape of ladies’ shoes and garish chandeliers.
Called Denny and Dizzy, they were hippies who seemed to perpetually wear an expression of slight confusion. Denny, who the camera frequently caught staring, wide-eyed, into the middle distance, seemed like she’d never fully quite come down from her last acid trip.
It came as no surprise that her offspring was also eccentric (although a rebellious streak inherited from countercultural parents can quite reasonably manifest itself in an accountancy career and Ford Mondeo). Her son, Dominic, padded around the shop in a dressing gown as if he was in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “I’ve got no scarf,” he replied to the always 'on-trend' Portas when she enquired as to why he was wearing a dressing gown on a visit to the plush offices of Elle Magazine, as if it were an obvious substitute for a neck garment.
Branching out
The likeable but spaced-out proprietors were losing £40,000 a year on Under the Moon and had ploughed much of their pension into the business. They’d even bought adjacent premises with a view to branching out into alternative health.
Upon discovering all this, a horrified Portas suggested that it wasn’t a laughing matter to a giggling Dizzy and Denny, but the fact they were laughing at least suggested that they had recognised their folly and the faint absurdity of their business decisions.
Staring into the gutter outside the shop, Portas reflected that “they are literally pouring money into that puddle”, thus demonstrating not only a keen understanding of the dangers of diversification into unrelated sectors but also a poor understanding of the nuances of the English language.
Dizzy acknowledged the saviour of Harvey Nichols’ diagnosis of Under the Moon’s problems and enthusiastically sought to implement her prescriptions. Denny, supposedly the creative force in the partnership, was less enamoured, still reeling from the revelation that her personal taste was, to put it mildly, no basis on which to source stock.
But, possessed of a Mother Earth serenity, she was never likely to mount the kind of spiky resistance we saw from the intransigent bakery owner of three episodes ago. Denny eventually bought into the new direction and was particularly enlivened by a sourcing service, the brainchild of Portas to service the needs of the cash-rich, time-poor community. The idea was that clients would outline specifically what kind of furniture or furnishings they wanted, and Denny and Dizzy would source them, adapting and restoring pieces as neccessary, in return for a finder's fee.
Among the recipients of this service was Jo Wood, who as the ex-wife of a Rolling Stone, Ronnie Wood, didn’t balk too much at paying a £30 finders’ fee for some vintage wallpaper. Wood and other clients were happy with their choices, at which point it occurred to me that these slightly spaced-out bohemian types are just the kind of people you’d want to source vintage or unusual furnishings for you, although when they visited clients' houses Portas fretted about the son hovering superfluously in the background in his dressing gown.
Eventually, Dominic deserted his parents’ efforts to revamp the shop but it doubtless made little difference. The shop relaunched as 37 Old London Road and Denny proclaimed herself “over the moon” that Under the Moon had been consigned to history along with Glam Rock.
