Boo. Monty Don is retiring in a couple of years as presenter of Gardener’s World, because it’s getting to be a slog and a treadmill. But he’s already doing his bit to influence the BBC’s choice of his successor. He told Times Radio that he thought the show needed more diversity – and that the BBC should think ‘ten times’ before picking an Oxbridge-educated middle-aged man again as its lead presenter:
‘In a truly just and fair society, we wouldn’t care what someone’s colour or race or creed or sex was. But the truth is that it’s much more delicate. And I think that I’m absolutely persuaded that in order to include everybody, you have to open doors that either are or seem to be shut. And if the door is perceived to be shut then it is shut even if actually you think it’s not.’
When it comes to gardening on telly, what we really want is someone magnificently dictatorial
As a would-be gardener, I can’t think of anything I want less than more diversity. I mean, if it happens that there’s a really good female gardening presenter out there – if the late Beth Chatto, for instance, could be resurrected for viewing purposes – who could do as good a job as Monty or his predecessor, Alan Titchmarsh, fair enough. But instead, when diversity is pursued for its own sake, it’s unlikely that’s what we’d get. Prioritising a presenter’s ethnicity, gender, religion or sexuality risks choosing someone less knowledgeable than the old bloke who previously occupied the post. Kathy Clugston on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time has, by diligent work, got to grips with her subject, but at the outset there were gaps in her knowledge about horticulture and it showed. She still gives the impression sometimes that she sees herself as cheerleader as much as presenter.
When it comes to gardening on telly, what we really want is someone magnificently dictatorial, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, who doesn’t follow fashion but knows about gardening. I give you Robin Lane Fox, the Oxford classicist who’s just written a book about Homer and his Iliad, but for a select few is known as the gardening correspondent of the Financial Times. His collected essays on gardening are fabulously intolerant of trends – he joyfully deploys pesticides (all right, I hear you) and would give the whole notion of turning your garden into a patch of weeds short shrift – but he really knows his stuff. He’s grander and older (77) than Monty Don and he’d annoy lots of viewers who don’t actually garden, but he has enormous style, he’s articulate and he’s an expert.
We want more characters, more eccentrics, more not-bland people in broadcasting, which may mean old men with precise diction and zero regional accent. One of my most pleasurable experiences in lockdown was listening to the late Mortimer Wheeler on archaeology – including his appearances on a brilliant quiz programme for archaeological boffins called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? – who had a huge moustache, an impish sense of humour, a home life which would have him cancelled instantly now, but was completely engaging about his subject. Are there any more like him out there? Anywhere?
Gardening broadcasting isn’t a means to some social end, like opening doors that are or seem to be shut. That’s something for the education system to sort out. It’s for instruction and entertainment and a means of harmless escapism for urbanites who don’t even have a garden and sublimate their longings by listening to Monty or Alan T. on composting. Give me a break from diversity. Just give me expertise.
Comments