…gardening television, its not actually that bad! Yes it’s pretty dire and boring - but so is most television. No, I’ve worked out that the real problem with horticultural T.V is not it’s content, but its paucity. If we had ten times more bad gardening programs on our televisions I’m sure that we could all find something crap that still perversely appealed to us, like with cookery shows, and even if we didn’t find anything exactly to our taste we would have all watched a different program on Friday night, so would be spared Saturday’s collective critical dismemberment of Gardeners World/Love Your Garden.
That’s why I’m dedicating this blog post to the five major television channels. I have developed concepts (copyright Ben Dark 2011) for five new television programs that I think will appeal to a wide audience. You guys can work out who gets what, but I’d like to see them in production by the autumn. Hopefully next spring you’ll have got them on the air and I can avoid another summer of listening to under stimulated gardeners moaning about Don and Titchmarsh being no Geoff Hamiltons.
1) Plant Perspectives
A gardening program filmed and narrated each week entirely from the perspective of one plant in our Midlands garden. Each week a different flower gives its unique take on the gardening season, from seed packet to compost heap!
2) Paradise Found
A fly-on-the-wall series following the trials and tribulations of one upper class eccentric as he replants his garden to form a living and unabridged version of Milton’s classic blank verse poem Paradise Lost. Do you like some narrative in your gardens? Are you desperate for gardening to be seen as highbrow art? Then rejoice as Anthony Gormanshall creates The Tartarus of Begonias!
3) Garden Wars!
A game show in which two middle aged gardeners compete horticulturally over the garden fence; the first driven to sell up loses! Expect rows, deliberately offensive bedding, malicious Tree Preservation Orders, ‘accidental’ herbicide drift, sun blocking, husband swapping and malicious gossip at the post office!
4) What Went Wrong?
A group of all star garden pundits provide post season analysis on the nations gardens and interview gardeners as they head back to their huts. ‘At the end of the day it was a year of two halfs Alan, and we might not have created many opportunities for flowers, but at the end of the day we avoided overfeeding the lawn.’
5) Gardeners Question Time
Real gardeners answer questions from their irate clients. This week: ‘Am I paying you to sit in your van and smoke rollies?’, ‘Didn’t we agree you’d be here three hours ago?’ and ‘Why have you pulled up all my fox gloves?’
I hope this helps guys. Let me know how you get on!
Anthony Gormanshall - a planting plan
I don’t see Garden Wars as a game show. I see it as a comedy along the lines of Mapp and Lucia. It would culminate at the end of the season with the local garden tour or flower show.
I too immediately began to think of . . bother, I can’t remember names of programmes . . . there was a comedy about a grumpy old man with a tortoise at the beginning . . . and there was another about a rebellious couple in a retirement home . . . Garden Wars could come out of the same stable.
And ‘Plant Perspectives’ . . . could work as a scientific, informative and absorbing programme – going right down to the micro-level.
Good suggestions Ben. (Some of them!)
Esther
Good ideas and would bring some light relief – although C5 (I think) is about to launch a programme along the garden makeover lines (I think) though it might be a day time one. From the trailer I saw though it didnt look that promising.
Garden Wars – LOL! Real GQT could also include “What do you mean, there will be brown earth showing between the plants until they grow larger?” or “I want a low maintenance garden with lots of herbaceous perennials – what do you think?”
Garden Wars sounds fantastic !