TV loves itself

How Britain Got the Gardening Bug used some fantastic old film footage of gardens from the second half of the twentieth century. All those glorious, grainy shots of grow bags being hauled off the back of flat bed trucks, small villages in ludicrous bloom and people having sad little barbies in their back gardens really cheered me up. Shame that each decade was introduced with tedious cliched footage: the eighties filofax, champagne, red braces montage, for example, was so far removed from real life it undermined the rest of the documentary. Exactly how accurate were they being about garden history when they mangled social history so badly?

Slightly random collection of guests: Penelope Keith, Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen, Nigel Slater and Germaine Greer ('I would shoot down hanging baskets') and all the gardening establishment. The usual talking head bullshit: Did pampas grass mean you were swingers? No, shut up, James Double-Barrelled whatever your bloody name is. And shut up the woman who wanted to go at the lovely pampas grass with a pickaxe and bonfire. Gnomes. Topiary. Dwarf conifers. Yes, the weight of cliched soundbite snobbery came down heavily on all of them.

There was some gorgeous old 70s Gardeners' World, with giant vegetables and a couple of old blokes admiring the length and girth of the shaft of an engorged leek. As one of the old geezers said to the other as he handed him a trophy, 'that exhibit of celery I shall remember for the rest of my life'. But half way through the documentary it stopped being about real gardens and became a clip show of Don, Titchmarsh and Gavin.

Love Geoff Hamilton. But James Wanker-Cockspurt claimed that it is almost impossible to hate Alan Titchmarsh. The 'almost' is key here. Oh god, I fancied Dermot Gavin at one point. Now I'd happily feed him into a composter, the arrogant prick. But as the real garden footage disappeared from the documentary so did any of the non garden mafia talking talking heads and any reason to carry on watching. Such a shame. It was a good demonstration of how TV has stopped being the observer and has become the story, in the same way that viewers have become the stars in the last decade. There was a great little documentary trying to get out here, but by the end it was just another excuse for otherwise unemployable media types to namecheck each-other and smile ruefully at their badboy reputations. I'd have much rather seen interviews with some old geezers and their giant marrows.