Hosed down with artificial cream

Highgrove: Alan Meets Prince Charles (BBC2, Thursday) brought us two men who are not quite national treasures, though who would certainly like to be. It’s interesting that ‘Alan’ apparently needs no surname, though ‘Charles’ requires the identifying title. But in spite of the implied matiness this was a deeply old-fashioned BBC royal slathering operation, in which no knee is unbent and no forelock goes untugged. Alan Titchmarsh could not get over how excited he was to be on his way to Highgrove and the prince’s garden: ‘its incomparable beauty and purity of purpose …by the best royal gardener in history,’ he breathed, even before he’d got there.

‘If you want to look into the heart of the future king of England, you need to look no further than into his own private garden …this is a garden of floral pageantry…a garden that satisfies all the senses…it seems to me that the whole ethos of this garden is that it is a garden that feeds the soul.’

It was like being hosed down with artificial cream. The garden did look lovely, and so it should, having 12 full-time gardeners, which I estimated means the prince has 298 times more help than we get from our bloke who comes in for three hours a fortnight. Admittedly, our garden is quite a bit smaller, and isn’t packed with busts of ‘his royal highness’, as everyone called him, or even busts of me. Nor has anyone written a suite to celebrate our garden in music, played by our personal harpist. One thing that they do appear to have in common is that they both need a great deal of manure shovelling over them. I got halfway through the show, and could take no more.