The Mancunian candidate

Like any other branch of human endeavour, medicine is susceptible to fashion, and every decade is marked out by a craze for some form of unnecessary surgery.

In the Fifties, they whipped out your adenoids (except in the case of Melvyn Bragg, who mistakenly had an extra couple of sets put in), in the Sixties they wanted your tonsils, in the Seventies your appendix, and 20 years ago expectant mothers suddenly began to be cajoled into Caesarean births as a matter of routine (presumably because male doctors assumed that women didn't want to end up with a vagina like a clown's pocket).

Over the past decade, cosmetic surgery has taken centre stage, and I myself am a victim of this vain and superfluous branch of medicine. You see, I lent a friend £2,000 last month so she could have plastic surgery performed on her face, and she was very cunning, because now I can't recognise her to ask for my money back.

I've never understood why women of a certain age allow themselves to be pumped full of chemicals (until they eventually have to sleep standing up, so that the silicone won't slide), because if they'll only learn to treat gravity as a friend rather than a foe, they'll find they are just as attractive in middle life as they were in their twenties.

It's part of our society's obsession with staying forever young, I suppose, an obsession so pervasive that Channel 4 (where youth is fetishised to the virtual exclusion of all other age groups) has now commissioned an entire series whose sole purpose is to make members of the public look 10 Years Younger.

"Everyone wants to know how to look younger," is presenter Nicky Hambleton-Jones's deluded cri de coeur (has she never encountered young fogeys of the Boris Johnson type, who gratefully embrace old age while still at university?), "but can it really be done in just 10 days?" Only with Botox, the extraordinary substance that makes tired old lines disappear as if by magic (I hope nobody ever spills any on this page, otherwise it'll end up as a blank piece of paper).

Last night's mutton-dressed-as-lamb-to-the-slaughter was Bernie Sharp, a 45-year-old prison officer who acted her age, but no longer wished to look it.

After she'd stood for an hour in Manchester's grimy grim shopping centre (an experience guaranteed to put years on anyone), the public consensus was that she looked 51, so the presenter was able to accomplish more than half her goal within moments, simply by removing the lab-rat from such a dismal and demoralising location.

Due to a diet of cigarettes and junk food, Bernie's skin had become somewhat lifeless, so off she went to a Harley Street clinic, for 16 Botox injections around the eyes and forehead, and 40 "facial fillers" (not to be confused with the face fillers we'd seen her consuming earlier outside Burger King).

Sure enough, her skin soon began looking a little smoother, but such treatment is short-lasting and ruinously expensive, so while she might just about be able to support her nicotine-and-chips habit on a prison officer's salary, the strain of trying to pay for regular Botox injections will soon put worry lines all over her face.