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| I thought seeing as Iv written a small essay I had better stick in a visual delight even though it has nothing to do with Chelsea. The first highlighter pink rose in the garden |
Chelsea, showcasing the pinnacle of garden design and the one time of year when there is more than one gardening programme on the TV in a single week. Helmed this year by Monty Don I did wonder what it would be like, but it turns out I love Monty on a sofa as much as I do up to his armpits in mud! Like a breath of fresh air, he hasn’t felt the pressure to smarten up by buying a new suit. That old faithful blue one is back out. What I love is he is prepared to not be a complete suck-arse and is able to say ‘isn’t it wonderful!... but I don’t like that’. I haven’t seen an awful lot of the coverage but did enjoy watching him thoroughly question one of the judges, much to their obvious dislike, I don’t think he would have got that from old Titchmarsh, good as he was. Monty seems determined to include the average Joe in his broadcasts and thank god otherwise those souls who just tune in to see some nice flowers and possibly some ideas of how to wedge some rusty metal into their garden would be turning over to something a little less heavy, like Eastenders after 5 minutes. I can write arty mumbo jumbo with the best of them but last night one guy who was interviewed had me lost. It was so bad I didn’t even get what he actually did for a living and he managed to include a sentence in which I didn’t know what a single word meant, and I am a firm believer in using a broad vocabulary in every day speech. Whilst he was spouting on, in full flow, me and the parents could do nothing but look at each other and shrug and it delighted me that by the bemused look on Monty’s face he evidently thought the same. His ‘Thank you for coming’ could basically be translated to ‘you’re a complete nut’.
This is my problem with Chelsea,
well actually I have several problems with it but they mainly hang around this
central complaint. Everybody takes themselves
far too seriously for my liking. Bearing
in mind that all the show gardens tend to be designed around having a water
feature, a paved area and walkway, a bench or seated area and a covered
‘pavilion’, and Joe Swift admitted last night that if a nursery said it would
have 300 iris perfect in time for Chelsea four of the gardens might use them, I
don’t know how the designers have the gall to stand there and spout on about
their ‘out there’ concept. Certainly if
you actually go in person you don’t have a clue why the riverbed is made of
rusty metal. Why is it impossible to
design something in life just because you thought it might look nice without
some great meaning? This is probably
just the cheesed off designer in me coming out here. But I definitely have a problem with someone
saying ‘I was going to cut back my garden but now Iv seen it grow wild and free
at Chelsea I realise its ok’. I doubt
that, your garden probably needs a damn good prune and that’s an excuse for
laziness.
So enjoy Chelsea, but take my
advice and do so from the comfort of your sofa.
In reality there is not actually much there and the gardens
are far smaller than they appear on TV.
Have you noticed how they never show the front edge of the garden when
filming a presenter in it? Makes it look
bigger, and its always filmed from above for the same reason. Without the designer being there to talk you
through the gardens they don’t really mean very much when you see them, and
good luck with even achieving that. You
can’t actually get in the gardens of course so your left peering in at the edge
as you are carried past in a sea of people or reduced to looking at it through
other people’s ipads as they hold them in front of your face as my mother was,
although apparently it showed the colours up better. Most people who go only stop to photograph
each thing then move straight on anyway.
Leave it to the artistic camera men at the BBC who have spent a lot of
time coming up with a dozen angles to film the same thing to pad out the
programmes for a week and put your feet up at home. Its not like you can actually buy anything
there, Hampton Court is were you want to be going with your flexible friend and
the year we went we spent at least half an hour sampling beer that was randomly
being given out in a garden, now we’re talking!
You could buy a rather snazzy egg shaped barbeque that was a little out
of my price range at over a grand, but maybe that highlights who this show is
really aimed at. Don’t get me wrong I
enjoyed going last year, you can’t get atmosphere on TV but this year Im
heading back to Hampton, a little lower brow and far more me.
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