Armchair Nation (54 page)

Gardeners, by nature people who are happy to wait for flowers to bloom and trees to mature, seemed particularly unconvinced by makeover programmes. Writing in
The Garden
, the Royal Horticultural Society's journal, gardening experts often criticised makeover shows, and readers' letters suggested that their opinions were widely shared. The
Gardeners' Question Time
presenter, Eric Robson, argued that celebrated gardens such as Sissinghurst and Stourhead would not now exist if our ancestors had behaved as we did, covering our little plots of land with container-grown shrubs, low-maintenance perennials and decking, which would ‘soon be to gardens what avocado suites are to bathrooms'. Alan Titchmarsh, the presenter of
Ground Force
, at which Robson's animus was directed, countered that it aimed to ‘appeal to and inspire those who would never dream of watching
Gardeners' World
and to whom the garden was a foreign country whose language and customs were beyond comprehension'.
⁵⁷

But gardening programmes had long stood for a different kind of populism, which believed in imparting esoteric knowledge to anyone prepared to make use of it by expending patient effort. Television gardeners had pioneered an unaffected, intimate way of talking to viewers. The owner of a hard mongrel rural accent forged mostly in the south Midlands, Percy Thrower could never work from a script
so he always ad libbed, believing that the plant would tell him what it wanted him to say. Perhaps because viewers thus found it easy to identify with them, Thrower and other
Gardeners' World
presenters profoundly affected gardening trends. An unapologetic user of paraquat and DDT, Thrower curated the age of lawns and rosebeds; his successor, Geoff Hamilton, a jeans-wearing, muddy-kneed socialist and environmentalist, introduced them to the organic era, building his own garden in Rutland from wasteland, happily recycling egg cartons for seedlings and polythene from the dry cleaners for the greenhouse. Habit-loving gardener-viewers trusted these presenters and were suspicious of change. ‘When you took over
Gardeners' World
from Geoff Hamilton my heart sank,' wrote a viewer to Alan Titchmarsh after his sudden assumption of presenting duties when Hamilton died of a heart attack in the summer of 1996. ‘I have been watching you closely over the past few months. You'll do.'
⁵⁸

Ground Force
seemed at first to have an equally striking effect on gardening trends. When Robert Pearcey, a painter and decorator, was convicted of stealing pebbles from the beach at Budleigh Salterton in Devon, the local mayor blamed
Ground Force
and its love of dry gardens full of shingle and stones. At Chesil Beach in Dorset, gardeners were sneaking on to the beach at night in search of plunder, armed with shovels and wheelbarrows. So many grey shale pebbles were taken from a shingle ridge at Crackington Haven on the Cornish coast that the cliff was in danger of collapse.

But the theft of stones to make rockeries had preceded
Ground Force
. Geoff Hamilton, to dissuade plunderers among
Gardeners' World
viewers, had shown them how to make rocks out of an artificial aggregate called Hypertufa. And it was
Gardeners' World
, rather than
Ground Force
, which had started the decking boom of the late 1990s. When Titchmarsh laid decking in his Hampshire garden on
Gardeners' World
(which he had christened Barleywood just before the copy deadline for the
Radio Times
that listed his first programme as presenter), and stained it deep blue, Cuprinol launched a preservative called ‘Barleywood Blue' which became the bestselling colour for trellises and fences. The spread of decking in back gardens, so prevalent
by the early 2000s that its stained wood effects could be seen from the new satellite imaging sites like Google Earth, was just part of a more general move, evident since the rise of the garden centre in the 1960s, towards seeing gardens as outdoor living rooms.
⁵⁹

In his next book,
Up the Down Escalator
(2002), Charles Lead-beater attributed the mushrooming of makeover programmes to a cult of ‘inner escape' and a ‘retreat into domesticity as an antidote to innovation and change'. ‘The more our working lives seem to involve screens, computers and ephemera, the more we seem to like gardens, changing our rooms and cooking,' he wrote. ‘Or perhaps it is simply that we like the
idea
of doing all these things and so we celebrate the possibility with glossy television programmes.'
⁶⁰
Or perhaps lifestyle TV was not really about ‘us' at all. Post-Thatcherite political culture tended to see the public as a single, apolitical entity – a mostly homogeneous, property-owning middle class, made up of ‘ordinary taxpayers' and ‘hard-working families'. In this quasi-mythical middle England, pop-psephological caricatures such as ‘Mondeo Man', ‘Worcester Woman' and ‘Pebbledash People' lived. Here, uncomfortable divisions of class and wealth could be skirted over with more nebulous allusions to leisure and lifestyle. This was just the kind of England (and, occasionally, the rest of Britain) featured in makeover shows. It was suburban, family-focused and, above all, homeowning – since there wasn't much point making over a rented flat or bedsit.

Mostly, though, these makeover shows were about the economics of television. They were partly a product of new technology, for cameras had become smaller and lighter and it was now easy to film in living rooms and small gardens. Compressing activities that normally took much longer into neat little half hours of mild tension, false jeopardy and instant reaction, they also fitted a world in which more and more half-hour scheduling slots had to be filled cheaply. Medhurst called it ‘the snowballing daytime-isation of evening TV'.
⁶¹
With more pressure to create replicable formats, the cheap, formulaic programmes that had filled the daytime schedules since the late 1980s were colonising primetime. These programmes then had an afterlife of repeats in the daytime, or on satellite and cable channels devoting themselves
solely to ‘lifestyle', like the Carlton Food Network, Granada Sky Food & Wine Channel or UK Living. Here, from breakfast into the middle of the night, you could watch people cooking dinner, doing up spare bedrooms and installing garden water features.

In the
Radio Times
in May 1996, Polly Toynbee derided the content of daytime television. There was now, she pointed out, a varied audience during the day: more people putting in shift hours or working from home, early retired people and, with the mass expansion of higher education in the 1990s, a new army of students with flexible hours. But this was not reflected in daytime TV. ‘Most of it looks cheap and designed for no one in particular – perhaps some computerised calculation of the lowest common denominator,' she complained. ‘It is a tepid, dishwater soup, without character or flavour, inhabiting some cardboard world 20 years out of date, in some imaginary middle suburbia.'

Toynbee conceded that were some exceptions, like the ‘awful but magic insanity' of
Supermarket Sweep
, an unrepentant paean to consumerism in which contestants in colour-coded sweatshirts pelted up and down the aisles trying to cram food into their trolleys. It had an audience of more than 3 million and was, according to the
New Musical Express
, causing an epidemic of lateness for morning lectures among students. But mainly, Toynbee concluded, daytime television was ‘Stupidvision – where most of the presenters look like they have to pretend to be stupid because they think their audience is … It talks to the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine and the microwave, without much contact with the human brain.'
⁶²

Daytime viewers, at least those who expressed an opinion, agreed. Toynbee invited
Radio Times
readers to send in their dream schedules to replace the ‘weary grunge of the past' and they wrote in asking for repeats of classic dramas like
Poldark
, prestige documentary series like
Civilisation
and the
Ascent of Man
, and lessons in foreign
languages, life drawing or how to play a musical instrument. ‘Women and men felt that daytime TV was aimed at an imaginary housewife whom they had never met,' concluded the BFI's study based on the submissions of its television diarists. They felt guilty, ‘like adulterers', about watching TV in the daytime. Young people in particular thought it was ‘trivial and insulting to women' and men were embarrassed at watching what they thought was a female ‘daytime ghetto'.
⁶³

The BFI study found that viewers were more likely to treat television as moving wallpaper when they were lonely or depressed. ‘TV … gives an air of colour, light, movement in the corner of the room which I can ignore at will but keeps at bay the very oppressive feeling of being alone,' wrote an elderly widow, living in remote rural Lancashire, for her television diary. An elderly man, also living alone, found television a comfort when feeling vulnerable or ill, and when he was particularly anxious he liked to watch the children's programme
Postman Pat
. During the period of the study, a teacher got divorced, lost her job and had a breakdown. She went from carefully choosing what to watch to sitting numbly in front of Saturday night shows like
Blind Date
and
Beadle's About
. The guilt people felt at relying on television as a ‘visual anti-depressant' was exacerbated because so many of the programmes were now about cooking, gardening and decorating, activities undertaken vicariously through the TV screen. ‘There is something unbearably poignant,' reflected Auberon Waugh, ‘in the BBC's claim that 3.5 million people regularly watch a low-budget mid-afternoon cookery programme called
Ready Steady Cook
.'
⁶⁴

In January 1996, suffering from inoperable bowel cancer and coming stoically towards the end of his life, George Mackay Brown was housebound, with little energy even to read, and found himself watching great tranches of daytime television for the first time. ‘On TV, there is a group of Australian families caught up in some perpetual string of dramas,' he told regular readers of his column in the
Orcadian
. ‘It is called
Neighbours
and is very popular with young people. I'm glad that, in our little neighbourhood in Stromness, there are few of these heart-wrenchings and deceptions, rages and reconciliations … I don't intend to watch it more … The dialogue is not
exactly spellbinding, nor is the Australian accent the most beautiful on this earth.'

Without identifying them by name, Brown also seems to have watched the high-octane, confessional American talk shows presented by Ricki Lake and Oprah Winfrey and their homegrown ITV equivalent Vanessa Feltz. Their culture of therapeutic excess and emotional incontinence must have seemed quite alien to this bard of Orkney. They discussed, he noted, ‘things which most people hide away in their heart's core … out it all comes, and the audience loves it, and now and then somebody stands up and either upbraids or congratulates the person in the hot seat. And if the show seems to be flagging, there is a lady who keeps it going the way a conductor handles a choir or an orchestra; and the lurid pot begins to bubble again.'

It is sad to imagine Brown, the great chronicler of the silent weight of ritual, tradition and landscape, who believed that ‘all relationships and all words end in solitude and in silence', ending his life watching shouty programmes with titles like ‘I'm terrified of my own child' and ‘Help! I married a love rat.' A small mercy is that the genre's exploitative nadir,
The Jerry Springer Show
, was at that time confined to the UK Living channel and Brown is unlikely to have seen it. ‘I hope I won't be watching afternoon TV for very much longer,' he signed off his column.
⁶⁵
He died in April, just three months later.

As television filled the schedules with the type of shows that Toynbee called Stupidvision, the end of the millennium saw a revival of the cultural jeremiads against television that had last enjoyed a serious vogue in the late 1950s. In 1996, David Burke, a New Jerseyite computer programmer living in Brighton, launched the British branch of the anti-television organisation, White Dot. While modern TVs switched off with what Thomas Hardy called ‘an eyelid's soundless blink', White Dot was named after the tendency for older televisions to keep firing electrons after they were turned off, until the cathode ray cooled down, so they arrived all at once at the centre of the screen, creating a white dot that shrank into nothingness like a distant, imploding star.

White Dot's ambitious aim was to reduce all televisions to dead
screens. Burke stood on a broken television set one morning near Westminster Abbey in front of a sign saying ‘Get A Life' and read out an open letter to Prince Charles asking him not to televise his coronation, when it came round. Burke felt that, since his mother's coronation in 1953 had marked the start of widespread television viewing in the UK, a TV-free crowning of King Charles would have a nice historical symmetry. A few days later, Prince Charles's office replied, politely refusing his request.
⁶⁶
Undaunted, White Dot organised an annual Turn Off TV Week and ritual events called
zócalo
(Mexican for ‘town square') in which people sat outside their houses and chatted to each other instead of watching TV. It also promoted a universal remote control for turning off televisions in pubs. White Dot had some affinities with the Idler movement, associated with an eponymous magazine that advocated a life defined by neither the Protestant work ethic nor passive consumption. Tom Hodgkinson, editor and co-founder of
The Idler
, would later rail against the pernicious passivity engendered by television, banning it for his children and preferring to spend his own evenings chopping wood, brewing beer and beekeeping. Among the middle classes there was a revival of camping, festivals and other outdoor activities, an ethic of living an active life rather than a substitute one in front of the television.