Wacky gardeners who make Prince Charles seem normal
As the evenings draw longer and offer us glints of rare sunshine, there’s a chance to enjoy some gardening. Get out there with the furniture polish and a duster to put a shine on the greenery.
Use a hairdryer to blow away any dewdrops on the roses. that lawn needs a trim, so make sure you’ve got your nail scissors.
Gardening is a precision art so, if you’re the sort who likes to stick a few tulip bulbs in a window box and hope, now would be a good time to hang your head in shame. the Great
Chelsea Garden Challenge (BBC2) is here to show us how horticulture should be done.
All this week, green-fingered Auntie Beeb is running a knock-out competition for keen amateurs, with the top prize being a plot at the Chelsea Flower show next week. the six contenders must create a series of spectacular instant gardens, using nothing but unlimited building materials, a team of labourers and a bottomless credit account at a garden centre.
In the first round, the aim was to create a cottage garden. You might imagine that means a tangle of wild flowers, fruit trees and unkempt flowerbeds, the sort of beautiful chaos that sprawls in any english village.
Instead, one contestant laid out hundreds of blooms like an oriental carpet: ‘ this is a turkish cottage garden,’ she announced. Another built a collection of towering wooden cranes, evoking a coalmine pit-head.
the second episode got even weirder. In the shadow of sudeley Castle in the Cotswolds, the rivals were given the task of creating a formal garden, symmetrical and precise, with geometric topiary. One woman tried to build hers in the shape of a grand piano.
this is not gardening in any conventional sense. It’s more like nouvelle cuisine with plants.
the gardeners themselves don’t seem normal either. One chap, a former City finance worker, wailed in distress every time he cut a worm in half with his spade.
the judges can match them every step for eccentricity. Prize-winning designer Ann-Marie Powell showed off a wardrobe like an LsD overdose — a dress cut from pink sofa fabric, another in vivid orange with a purple beret and knee-length boots, and a coat of many colours that had apparently been liberated from a production of Joseph And his Amazing technicolor Dreamcoat.
her fellow judge, writer and fellow of the Royal horticultural society James Alexander- sinclair, didn’t mince his words.
he scythed down one garden with the words: ‘this one is teetering on the edge of being boring.’ Another was: ‘Quite ropey in places’.
his accent was so refined, it seemed to make the shrubbery stand up straighter. ‘I’d like it to be bolder and great big mouthfuls rather than little nibbles,’ he declared, with regal diction. ‘Mouthfuls’ came out as ‘maithfools’, the way Prince Charles would say it.
But even the gardens at highgrove, his Botanic Majesty’s country residence, can’t be as bonkers as this.
A different sort of madness was loose in No Offence (C4), writer Paul Abbott’s surreal vision of an inner- city Manchester police station fuelled by rampant female hormones.
the male coppers wear a look of permanent terror. Little wonder, when Joanna scanlan is stomping around as DI Viv Deering.
About to raid a drugs den, she snarled: ‘they’ve caught me on a full moon so they won’t know what’s hit ’em.’ No Offence got off to a bad start last week. It was confused, shapeless and indecisive: Abbott didn’t seem to know what he was writing, a comedy or a soap.
Now scanlan and her co-stars, elaine Cassidy and Alexandra Roach, have grabbed the narrative by the scruff of its neck. they’re playing the silly scenes straight, including the most slapstick and farcical.
scanlan didn’t blink when she briefed two butch firearms coppers, even when the women thumped their chests and barked, ‘Ma’am!’ in a sort of fascist lesbian salute.
the show is still far from convincing. But the performances are brazen and brave, and there’s a compelling thread of evil at the core. If you enjoy dark crime stories on tV, this could be worth a second look.