M&S undies, and their uncanny hold on the nation.

Every once in a while I go to a posh boutique in the 'burbs, one that my Mum has patronised for years, to buy a Special Occasion Dress. The shop is staffed, intimidatingly, by women of a certain age, the type who give you no privacy whatsoever in the changing room, manipulate your boobs into gold trimmed cruisewear, oblivious to your bleating objections, then yell outside, Arlene! Go and get me one two sizes larger! - making you wish that the changing room was in fact a black hole and that you had been swallowed up inside it. When you finally manage to croak from behind the curtain that you Just Don't Think This Is You, they sigh a very obvious sigh of contempt, and say, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, well if you don't like it then off it comes. What they mean is, well if a cretin like you hasn't got the taste enough to recognise that silk lame pyjamas are the last word in cool then you are beyond help. However, they do a nifty line in block colour cocktail dresses and when I manage to struggle into one it generally looks pretty damn fabulous. Except for the knicker line. Don't worry, the sales assistant says briskly, with the right underwear that'll tuck you in perfectly. The right underwear. Would she be talking about those huge old lady pants Bridget Jones held in such abhorrence, that suck all your spare tyres in so that you look fabulous but cannot in fact breathe? If so, then the sad truth is that I wear The Wrong Pants pretty much seven days out of seven. I, along with the rest of the nation, buy my pants at M&S. The packs of three that come either in just black, or just white, or black and white stripes, or black and white dots. They come in huge prehistoric shape through to thong shape. There literally is a style and size for every known body shape. Sometimes they have lace decoration, designed to hide their intrinsic mediocrity. They scream VPL, they are what you grab for comfort and generic invisibleness, they don't attempt to hold anything in - in fact, they take ostentatious pride in letting it all hang out - and they are a wildly successful product. If you want to wear a Cute Cocktail Dress, they are the Wrong Knickers. For the 99.95% of us walking the globe who do not have the perfect figure, wearing The Right Knickers with that special occasion dress comprises indigestion from a mercilessly flattened tummy, heat rash from the Right Knicker lining, and the miserable anticipation of how to get the damn things off at the end of the evening - hard enough to get on in the first place, after an evening of canapes and whatever alcohol, getting them off just feels like more than one's life is worth. Recently there have been several pictures of Beyonce flashing her Spanx on stage, and stories of celebs "triple Spanxing" (I gasped at this one. It took me half an hour to get one pair of Spanx on. How do you get three on? With a forklift truck and several cranes??) but in any case, we are not fooled. Spanx may be the Right Knickers but they are not and will never be, desirable underwear. Desirable underwear is one of a three pack that doesn't mind how many spare tyres it has to accommodate, it just bags out obligingly. There is definitely a message for the marketing specialists in there somewhere.