This show... irked me. Beyond belief. From the visual style to the chintzy script and right-on folky soundtrack, The Edible Garden was everything that makes me go 'nyergh' at lifestyle shows on the TV.
Before I go crazy with rage again, check out the review on WWM or read it below the fold.
The Edible Garden
A troublesome trend is emerging from BBC2’s commissioning department. Dreadful middle class types are being thrown chunks of BBC cash to fund showing us oiks how to improve our lives through making the urban rural, in a variety of impractical ways. Like installing a pig in your airing cupboard or growing peashoots in the carpet of your living room. ‘Go on’, these sons of the Hampstead soil tell us, ‘it’s easy to produce a delicious harvest. And it’s like, totes rewarding, yeah?’
Being encouraged to grow my own drugs by an over-earnest foetus with a predilection for ‘foraging’ was pretty insulting – especially as every concoction was accompanied by an onscreen caveat saying something like ‘this doesn’t work – drink a Lemsip instead’. Then, Nigel Slater’s soporific programme about the contents of his larder, the volume of his pantry and the vast acreage of his bloody herb garden upped the irking ante thanks to its horrid faux-rusticity and Waitrose window-display aesthetic. But what’s really raised me to furious apoplexy is The Edible Garden, which is essentially The Good Life made flesh. Patchouli-smelling, hempen flesh.
Alys Fowler, writer and gardener, kicks off by telling us she’s going to experiment with avoiding shop-bought fruit and veg by cultivating her ‘tiny Victorian terrace garden’: a mere 60 feet by 20 feet! (That’s bigger than my entire flat, pig-filled culverts and all.) It’s immediately apparent this isn’t going to be a blood-and-guts, Man vs The Elements affair thanks to lots of soft-focus pretend Super 8 footage of Alys knobbing about in the bushes and a coffee-shop soundtrack of polite jazz and folky pluckin’ and strummin’. It’s infuriatingly right-on.
You can probably patch together your own montage of countrified sequences featuring Alys in her garden. There’s the stroking-the-plants shot, the lens-flare-through-the-leaves shot, the examining-something-intently shot, all narrated in a cut-glass voice so achingly pleased with itself you’d think you were listening to Crick or Watson telling you how they’d grown a double helix of DNA in their potting shed rather than a posho naming her chickens Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Let’s just hope the birds don’t meet that other literary giant of the garden, the Fantastic Mr Urban Fox…
This being a lifestyle show from Auntie, there’s got to be a bit of cooking thrown in. No point in growing heavenly cucumbers if you don’t cook them, eh? This time around, Alys makes some falafels, having first bought the chickpeas from a supermarket, despite not popping to Tesco being the whole fucking point of the show. She also whips up some Peatinis.
Yup, a martini made with – get this – peas. How rare. It all smacks a little of the derided Miss Dahl, particularly when Alys serves the vittles to her similarly rah-rah friends; the sequence of them all chumming about while some fey 60s film is projected onto the back wall of her house is truly sick-making.
To me, these shows give the lie to the self-sufficiency lark. Despite telling me how simple tilling the land is, they seem to show how impossible it is to stuff your shelves with homegrown produce for anyone with normal commitments. As far as I can tell, you’d have to dedicate your already scant leisure time to continual mulching and picking. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to be a silver-spooned media dossabout who’s paid to muck around in the mire all day, peeling out inanities like “[My garden] seems to be more free and fluid, and nature seems to be more responsive.”
Well, boys and girls, it’s a sham. Whatever telly says, we’ll have to get our five a day the way nature intended: frozen and from Aldi.
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