Welcome to my blog. I am a former local journalist who now works in PR and a Conservative and community activist in Woking and Horsell. This blog will keep updated on local issues as well as my interests and quirky news stories.
Many of today’s papers carry the story about the BBC having to back down over the new series of Gardener’s World, due to begin in March. I had read about the controversy surrounding the changed format of the show for 2009, especially from the established viewers. But I think the corporation should have stood its ground.
I never watched the show before 2009 because I never had a garden to speak of. Last year, I designed beds, cleared turf, dug over, planted, fed, watered, fretted and harvested like millions of other gardeners across the country. I derived that same therapeutic enjoyment and experienced one of the great glories of England – working in one’s garden on a warm spring day. I can’t imagine ever giving that up now for as long as I am able.
But to me, Gardener’s World in its current form was superb. Yes, it was a bit ridiculous that the team was able to move onto a wasteland and seemed to have unlimited resources to create walls, glass and beds that most people can only dream of. But I like Toby Buckland and his team and particularly that the show was not aimed at people who knew the Latin names of everything growing on their property.
And I take exception to the notion that the amateur kitchen gardening that I did is not the ”proper, grown-up gardening” the GW viewer wants to watch. For thousands of years, kitchen gardeners on differing scales have kept their communities alive. By comparison, flower gardening has only been a working man’s pursuit since the war.
Not that I don’t like flower gardening – I’m sure it’s something I’ll turn to in due course. But by then, I shouldn’t need a programme each week to tell me how to do it and I’ll be happy to leave GW to those just beginning to experience the pleasures of the garden. For the serious gardener surely moves on to RHS reference books and, of course, Gardener’s Question Time.
I wish the BBC had kept the current format for a second year – people need time to get used to change as with Top Gear, the programme to which the new GW was sneering compared (and another programme that I enjoy very much). What we are likely to end up with is a compromise that will neither be accessible enough to entice the “new guard-ners”, nor pure enough for the “Latinistas“.
Another great British Broadcasting Corporation compromise.
