Full focus on the final
WE STARTED with six eager contestants. Tonight we reach the final of GREAT BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHY CHALLENGE (BBC Four, 9pm) with just…er, hang on, can this be right? Six eager contestants?
Oh, of course, I remember now. Legendary photographer Rankin, the chap in charge of this thing, didn’t want to have to send some poor soul home each week.
So he insisted they all stay in contention throughout. No dance-off, no sing-off, no naff-off, none of that stuff.
Still, he’s going to have to stick his neck out eventually because someone has to win.
So he asks the photographers to conclude tonight by each picking what they feel have been their best bunch of shots. He’ll then compare these and pick his star snapper. Or try to.
“They’ve all developed so much,” he insists, which is both a lovely thing to say and a rather fine photographic pun.
Elsewhere tonight, still great and still British, we have the return of GREAT BRITISH GARDENS WITH CAROL KLEIN (Channel 5, 9pm).
Now, I do like a gardening show. I don’t actually do any gardening myself (my Latin’s not up to it) but I love being able to empty my brain for an hour and just gawp at lots of pretty flowers and trees.
I particularly enjoy doing this in the company of Carol, whose enthusiasm is so infectious that I can sometimes watch her for several minutes at a stretch without thinking: “Gosh, she really does have strange hair, doesn’t she?” Carol’s first port of call in this latest run is Arundel Castle in Sussex, ancestral home of several Dukes of Norfolk.
Its oldest bits date back to 1067 but its vast gardens as we see them now are relatively new. In a typical year, they’re visited by more than 180,000 people, which frankly sounds hellish, but on the autumn day when Carol first visits it’s just her.Well, her and a handful of Arundel’s gardening team, headed by a charming chap called Martin Duncan.To be honest, there’s nothing Martin shows Carol that she doesn’t love.
From the outset, she’s wowed by his multi-stemmed trachycarpus fortunei.And his salvia vanhouttei? Don’t get me started.
Arundel’s gardens, Carol points out, are “not the sort of thing you can replicate at home…” (Great. Now she tells us.) “…but the point is everyone can enjoy what is a grand ducal experience”.
Well, quite. Except on Mondays, she should have added.The website says they’re shut on Mondays.
It also says: “As from 14 June 2021,Arundel Castle Gardens will no longer be accepting the Gardeners’World 2-for-1 entry card.”
Sounds like Carol got there just in time.