The other night I found myself watching one of those makeover progammes. This one wasn't about a room being made over, or a house, but a person - a gentle young woman who was said to look ten years older than her actual 30 years.

The person in charge of the makeover walked around her commenting on her untidy hairstyle, her fat tummy, her excess body hair, in tones of the utmost disgust. If that young woman hadn't felt bad about herself beforehand, she certainly would have done by then.

Of course it was, in a way, all right in the end. After a few days in the hands of a personal trainer, a make-up artist, a top hairdresser and a fashion advisor - and the expenditure of several hundred pounds - she emerged looking youthful and very lovely. I'm sure it boosted her morale.

But it's not all right, is it? What about all those hairy, overweight, badly dressed young women watching the programme who haven't got an army of makeover people on hand, who haven't got hundreds of pounds to spend on their appearance? How are they going to feel? "I'm ugly. I'm worthless and disgusting, and quite rightly, everyone's going to look down on me"?

That's the trouble with these programmes. Appearance is everything. There's never any attention paid to the person under the less-than-perfect looks. In my view, they give completely the wrong message about what matters in life.

I was watching this around the time Mo Mowlam died. In her youth she was a pretty woman, blonde and slim. But the Mo Mowlam we all remember is the sturdy figure in a wig, of whom the word beautiful would never have been used - except that in a very real sense she was more beautiful than the young Mo had ever been.

Through the ravages of time and disease, her real self shone through, her warmth and courage, the readiness to throw aside conventional ways of doing things so that real progress could be made, so that life could be transformed for the better. The person she was inside made her, not pretty, but truly beautiful.

It's that sort of beauty we should be celebrating and holding up to younger generations. That's why these makeover programmes do us a huge disservice. All right, most of us try to give nature a helping hand. We colour our hair, wear make-up, try to find clothes that suit us. It makes us feel a bit better about ourselves. But that's all it does, in the end. You can't cheat nature for ever. Even people who go to the extreme of undergoing endless cosmetic surgery are never going to achieve the beauty they crave. The result you see is not eternal youth, but a kind of coating that is neither old nor young, just rather scarily unreal.

Inevitably, inexorably, age and time catch up with the most beautiful of us. And what we are left with then is what we ourselves have done to our faces, by the way we've lived: the bitter grooves around the mouth, the permanent frown - or the laughter lines, the radiant smile, full of kindness and sympathy, which distracts everyone from the ageing skin around it.

Certainly, how we appear to others is in our hands - but it's what we are inside, not what we put on the outside, that decides whether or not we have a beauty that lasts.

Published: 01/09/2005