Call the Gardeners! Miranda and her mum are a blooming hoot...
Such fun! Miranda hart’s mum is teaching her galumphing girl how to garden. But it isn’t Patricia hodge wielding the secateurs, though the actress frequently stole the show as Miranda’s bossy mother in her eponymous sitcom. The star of All Gardens Great And Small (More4) really is Miss hart’s venerable parent, the horticulture expert Dee hart Dyke.
Miranda insists she didn’t inherit the gardening gene, which explains why hart Snr is a judge for the Royal horticultural Society while hart Jnr claims she doesn’t ‘even know what a plant is’.
But it’s obvious that a filthy sense of humour runs in the family.
The two of them were in fits as soon as they started pruning the ivy in Miranda’s overgrown back yard. ‘It’s rampant!’ snorted Dee, a word they repeated till they were breathless.
When Mum proposed that what her daughter’s foliage really needed was a good sorting-out from a burly man, both women doubled over in hysterics.
The gardening tips are entertaining, if often daft — for example, donkey dung is just the thing to keep aphids off your box hedges. But the real interest lies in seeing how similar mother and daughter are, and guessing how much of real life creeps into Miranda’s comedy.
Dee is ridiculously posh, the sort of upper-middle blue-blood who secretly thinks the Royal Family are a bit arriviste. She drives an old banger, a 1968 Singer estate, with nearly 200,000 miles on the clock. You have to be seriously aristocratic to do that and look dotty instead of skint.
Inspecting one gardener’s summerhouse, a wooden platform overlooking his collection of banana plants, she declared that it wouldn’t look out of place ‘in Keen-yah’.
Most people say ‘Ken-ya’. To get away with the White Mischief pronunciation, you need to have at least a baronet and a castle in the family. The hart Dykes have both.
Dee takes British politeness to an extreme, just like her daughter. When she steps backwards and accidentally treads on a plant, she apologises effusively to it: ‘Oh, I am so awfully sorry!’
The two women are straight out of the same mould, then. But we did catch one hint of a difference: they might not agree about Brexit.
Tutting over her daughter’s flowerbeds, Dee warned: ‘You don’t want those bluebells — they are Spanish and they’ll seed themselves everywhere.’
Miranda looked aghast: ‘heaven forfend we have some Europeans in my garden, mother!’
If it’s posh you wanted, though, the best place to look was Jamie Oliver’s new series, Quick And Easy Food (c4). The fat-lipped Essex chef might not be able to master basic words like ‘perfection’ — he says ‘prefection’ — but he uses only ingredients so exclusive, they come with their own Michelin star.
Take his first dish of seafood and mash. Jamie insisted on ‘hand-dived scallops’ as one of his five ingredients, which he fried with black pudding.
Scallops and black pudding is the sort of hoity-toity dish that Dave and Sam cam might order in cornwall’s most upper-class fish and chip shop to look like ‘normal people’ on holiday.
And why did the shellfish have to be ‘hand-dived’ — plucked off the ocean bed one at a time, instead of factory-farmed? It would be cheaper to fry £50 notes.
Jamie has lost touch with reality. At one point, he urged us to ‘add a simple splash of red wine vinegar from your store cupboard’, as though we all live in delicatessens. This show is for lottery winners only.
SNACK OF THE NIGHT: Nadiya Hussain went out foraging in Scotland on her British Food Adventure (BBC2) and plucked hawthorn leaves, once a schoolchild’s treat. She wasn’t convinced. ‘I used to have a bag of crisps,’ she reminisced.