My sister Caz has a story which, on the telling, splits the sexes fairly down the middle.

Four years ago, in Chinatown, she was crossing the road while wearing a particularly ferocious pair of silver shoes. As she waited at a pelican crossing, an Asian guy with freaky earrings tapped her on the back, and said: “I just wanted to say my darling, you look absolutely GORGEOUS!" - then carried on his way.

It's at this point that any audience splits into two camps. The men will say “Jesus! When will the Government see sense, and put them all back into institutions?”

The women, meanwhile, will become ludicrously over-excited, and bounce on their chairs, and say: “Was it Gok? Was it Gok? It sounds like Gok! It was Gok! OH MY GOD IT WAS GOK!”

My sister likes to smile serenely at this point, and say: “Yes - I like to believe it was Gok.” At which point the women scream even more, and maybe even paw at their faces a bit, moaning “Gok! Gok!”

For now we have the vote, and equal rights legislation, it might well be that Gok Wan, star of How to Look Good Naked, is the most significant person in the lives of 21st-century women. I don't wish to overstate his importance, but if Gok asked me to give up my job, and join him in wandering from village to village, preaching and changing the lives of the many, I would. I am an Apostle of Gok.

For those who have never seen Gok's show, How to Look Good Naked, the premise is simple. Gok Wan - camp Anglo-Chinese stylist with “statement” glasses, like the cardboard 3-D ones you get in cereal packets - is on a mission. He wishes to get the nation's women to stop loathing themselves, put a comb through their hair and wear exciting, red shoes.

That Gok does this with a real, tender love is what makes him - unlike other makeover mavens, like Trinny and Susannah, or that ice-faced bitch from Ten Years Younger - a revolutionary. Honestly. A revolutionary. It's quite obvious. In an average day of media consumption - TV, adverts, movies - I'll see, say, ten pairs of hard, plastic breasts. Likewise, all the arses in my viewing world are perfect. I'll never see a tit like a Womble's nose, or an arse that appears, as they so often do, to have a second arse growing out of it. (Unless, of course, the arse or breasts are on a dead prostitute in a ditch, in some hardcore drama - in which case they're allowed to look as “normal” as you like.)

Against this background, then, Gok spends an hour a week getting as many average, thirty-and-forty-something women to take their clothes off as possible. This is an act which provides this country with its sole source of positive, normal female body-images. Within ten minutes of the show starting, I can feel my body neuroses sweating out of me, like toxins in a sauna. Christ, I think - in a possibly unsisterly, but ultimately beneficial, way. I'm not half as bad as some of these freaks. I need to ease up on myself a bit.

Having given the women of Britain a calming demonstration in female normality, Gok then gives his subjects a crash course in not giving a toss what anyone else thinks. This is something with so little precedent in straight, female history that the list consists pretty much of Bette Davis, and Cyndi Lauper in the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun video.

In the first show of the new series, he gets an entire Weight Watchers group to pose for saucy pictures, re-names stretch marks “lady lines”, and gets a previously downtrodden mother-of-three sashaying down the main aisle of Debenhams - merely with the words “Mince down there, dear.” It's all truly joyous.

Oh dear, I'm running out of words for all the reasons why I love Gok, and I haven't even told you about how oddly erotic the show can be, or how I watch it with my seven-year-old daughter, and use it as a springboard to have serious talks about feminism. Or how I always end up crying at the end. I could Gok around the clock. He's a public service. He should be on every hour, on the hour, like the news. The Nudes, maybe.

How to Look Good Naked, Tues, Channel 4, 8pm

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