Last Night's Television: Gok's Fashion Fix, Channel 4<br />Horse People with Alexandra Tolstoy, BBC2

They make no bones about who the series is aimed at: 'OK girls, I'm back' Gok began. (Abbie Trayler-Smith)

Gok's got a brand new mantra, and, as it happens, a brand new bag. The mantra, which was repeated at least four times and possibly more was "Shop less but wear more". Got that? Shop less... but... wear more. Or, as the presenter of Gok's Fashion Fix put it, "OK, ladies, hold on to your hats, scarves, coats and knickers... credit-crunch couture is here." The bag, incidentally, was a £70 Oasis number togged out with some earrings and beads so that it could see how it might compete against a £1,000 number in the programme's climactic catwalk head-to-head, during which Gok's high-street stylings battle it out with a set of designer outfits. Of which more later... but not before the theme has been carefully underlined again, just in case anyone watching had become so excited at the sight of a Topshop cardigan that they'd lost sight of the New Thrift: "You do not need to go ker-ching to look breathtakingly bling," insisted Gok.

They make no bones about who the series is aimed at: "OK, girls, I'm back," Gok began, "and I've got more fashion tips than you can possibly handle." I'm not a girl and I can generally handle only one ("Are you really going out in that?" uttered in a tone of faint incredulity by my wife) before becoming restive, so my impatience with this series isn't really a fair measure of its quality. I am perhaps better placed than its target audience to detect its inherent contradictions though, since at no point was I sitting there thinking, "God, I must rush down to River Island before everybody else gets there and those shoes sell out." And no matter how much Gok goes on about accessorising, and wardrobe combinations and the clever use of classics it's clear that at the heart of the programme lies the desire for something new to cram in the wardrobe.

The contradictions seemed particularly conspicuous in the case of Dawn, a Cornish social worker who had been styling herself for the last 20 years as a kind of frumpy hooker, and whose wardrobe Gok used for an exercise in power decluttering. He replaced it with a capsule wardrobe of 24 interchangeable items, obeying another of his dicta ("Buy timeless designs that will never date"). But since he'd begun by disapprovingly pointing out that Dawn hadn't changed her style for years you knew that he'd probably be back in another six months telling her it was time to refresh the collection, and it wouldn't be long before Dawn couldn't get anything out of her cupboards without a crowbar again. She looked marvellously improved with her new clothes, incidentally, the expensive hair-do and cosmetic job presumably being exempt from the general trend towards budgetary restraint.

The final contest between designer labels and high-street invention wasn't exactly on message either. Gok did manage to persuade Janet Street-Porter to go to the Brits in an outfit bought on the high street, but when they got the vote in the final face-off, the shoppers of Birmingham opted for the cripplingly expensive outfits rather than the merely spendthrift ensembles that Gok had put together – sending his rival, a fabulously grating woman called Brix Smith-Start – into a little paroxysm of Ab Fab triumph. I suspect someone on the production team shares my impatience with Brix's strained attempts at character ("It's so beautiful it's as if an angel sneezed on it," she said about a cashmere cardigan that would have covered the deposit on a starter home): there was a mischievously insolent iris-out at one point, from one of Brix's squealing raptures to the anus of her little pug Pixie.

Since Gok can be funny I would have quite liked to hear his opinion on the fluorescent flamenco dresses that Alexandra Tolstoy found herself flicking through, while being made over for a festival of Spanish horsery in Horse People with Alexandra Tolstoy. As the title suggests this too is sniper, rather than shotgun broadcasting, aimed at a pretty tight bull that doesn't include me. Last week, the programme upset its natural constituency (people who think horses are fascinating) by including a kind of equine snuff movie, in which a mare was killed for its meat. This week, they got a horsey porn flick, with an unusually flushed Alexandra observing the process by which a Spanish stallion is divested of its lucrative seed, after being worked up a horse fluffer. The episode ended with Alexandra riding along on the pilgrimage to the Virgin of El Rocio, which, since it involved masses of horses, she found stirring and enchanting. It looked like a fiesta of superstitious reaction to me, hundreds of people doing something because hundreds of people had done it the year before and concluding in a lot of violent shoving and punching around a gold statue of the Madonna. The statue is supposed to have healing properties but looked, on this day at least, to be responsible for quite a lot of minor injuries and a huge number of really terrible hangovers.