I have always found the conventions of how gardening is talked about on TV weirdly fascinating. Not only because it is all so different from how I and my friends think about gardening, but also because I wonder if the approach taken, born largely out of a desire to broaden its commercial appeal, paradoxically hampers our ability to reach people. Let’s just imagine, for a minute, what would happen if the presenters of food TV shows talked like those of garden TV…
First you’d have your obligatory “jobs for the week”, which would be a seasonal reminder of all the little chores you had to do around your kitchen, starting off with detailed advice on how to defrost your freezer. Showing the one “proper” way to do this, it would end with a reminder that it had to be repeated at least once every six months. There’d be a lengthy segment on the best way to peel an onion next, followed by tips on how to reorganise your spice rack. Actually, wait, that’s not quite right. They wouldn’t be described as simple tips to make things easier, they would be called “rules”, implying that if you, for whatever reason, didn’t memorise and follow them to the letter, everything would fall apart.
