I woke up this morning with several aches and pains for which I hold Alan Titchmarsh and his evil assistant Charlie Dimmock personally responsible. If you have a TV and have tuned it in to the BBC at any time during the last 6 months you will have seen one of this sadistic duo's 30-minute propaganda campaigns for the garden fork and wheelbarrow industry, or as they prefer to call them 'lifestyle magazine programmes'. There are, I think, about 37 of them, but if I tell you there is just one, and it is 14 hours long and called 'Home Front Celebrity Ground Force Challenge Special Small Garden Taskforce Makeover- Uncut!' you will get the idea. What happens in these shows is that our heroes Titchmarsh and Dimmock descend on some unsuspecting householders, and with the apparent aid of nothing more than a pair of sturdy spades and a regular supply of strong tea, transform their 'garden' - an overgrown 6-foot-square patch of land whose central feature is a rusty burnt-out Ford Cortina- into an open-air urban paradise containing fully seventeen hectares of lush greenery, complete with fountains modelled on those at the Alhambra and, over in a shady corner, a team of mermaids strumming pensively on harps made of solid gold. All this in 10 minutes flat and for a total budget of £17.63.
The important word in the preceding paragraph, of course, is 'apparent'. You think it has all been done with spades and tea because of the skilful editing which has obscured from view the small matter of the 16-ton articulated lorry containing an army of slaves, each with the strength of a lion and armed top-of-the-range B & Q rotovators, pneumatic drills, cement-mixers and a giant crane borrowed from the reconstuction of Wembley stadium. Oh, and the fact that the programme is not really filmed over lunchtime at 37 Railway Cuttings Harrogate, but over 6 months, and at a cost to the British licence payer of £350 000, in the secret private garden of the crown prince of Trinidad and Tobago, who happens to be a personal friend of Dermot Mernaghan.
Anyway you get the idea. You watch the show (whichever of the 37 shows it happens to be) and you start to get ideas about the possible transformation of your own, adequate but unspectacular patch of greenery into something more eye-catching and contemporary. 20 minutes later you are in B and Q, and having scoured the aisles in an unsuccesful search for mermaids, content yourself with a spade, a fork, a dutch hoe, a wheelbarrow and a trowel. Later that night you start cheerily hacking away at your lawn with the spade, reckoning to be putting the final touches to the giant musical fountain in time for Coronation Street.
Except, of course, you have been fooled. Giant musical fountains, as you come to realise during 2 solid weeks of hacking, spading, shovelling and swearing (most of all swearing) are the sole preserve of the Crown Prince of Trinidad and Tobago and his evil henchman Dermot Mernaghan. At the end of these two weeks you look up to see the result of your labour, and see that it is the following:
One not-very-level and rather grubby patch of muddy soil. liberally splattered with housebricks.
No mermaids at all
A bad back and some strange shooting pains down the left side, possibly a small heart attack.
It is at this point that you put down the dutch hoe, walk calmly into your front room, and with a mighty cry of 'Alan Titchmarsh you lying, cheating BASTARD', hurl your thirty inch colour television into the High Street. At this point, strangely, you start to feel ever so slightly better.
Which reminds me. Euro 2004 starts on Saturday and my television appears to be out of order. Titchmarsh, you really are a bastard, aren't you?
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