Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 89

'horticultural expert and gardening guru Matthew Vincent'. Anne was subsequently
tutored about the ideal growing conditions for such plants. Like the novice gardener,
the expert can always 'buy in' goods and expertise if specialist knowledge is not
available - solutions can always be purchased in consumer culture. An important
function of the expert was to out-source the ideas they provide to a host of goods
that can be purchased in DIY and garden centres and related markets. 6 In these ways,
some of the lifestyle 'experts' were less authoritative legislators conveying the hard
facts of gardening, than friendly well-researched consumers, interpreting the latest
lifestyle shopping ideas for the would-be gardener. Such 'experts' strove to establish
empathy with viewers by lowering their differences in knowledge, personality and
outlook between themselves and audiences. Codes of authority and expertise, as
Chaney argues, have changed in public life, 'Rather than public figures presenting
themselves as awesome, distant or threatening, they increasingly strive to be as one
of the neighbours' (Chaney 2002, 109).
It is not that gardening expertise was entirely moribund in lifestyle television,
rather, there was a shift in how knowledges were presented during the period.
Within the makeover genre, gone were the didactic modes of address which once
characterised early gardening programmes. The instructional close-up sequence of
seed-sowing or pruning, accompanied by an authoritative voice-over was regarded
as an outmoded means of engaging contemporary audiences. The more common
vocabulary of address was more likely to show the personality-interpreter in mid-
shot partnership with his or her clients, assessing and interpreting their needs, or
re-framing their garden dreams to fit the transformative remit of a makeover design.
In these ways, leisure programming has undergone a series of changes in form and
tone since the late 1960s. Brunsdon (2001) charts the historic shift in the 'televisual
grammar' of early 1970s 'didactic' gardening programmes to the 'generic hybridity'
which characterises lifestyle gardening in the 1990s (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 55).
Early programmes were distinguished by the use of close-up shots on the continuous
demonstration of gardening tasks, with, 'an insistence on objects and operations,
and camera, editing and commentary are governed by the logic of exposition: 'this
is how it is', 'this is what it looks like', 'this is what you do' (Brunsdon et al. 2001,
55). For Brunsdon, garden lifestyle programmes of the period departed from the
old through the, 'balance they offer between instruction and spectacle' (Brunsdon
2001, 54). Such lifestyle makeover programmes retained a diluted element of how
to do garden tasks, but these were subordinate to the melodramatic spectacle of the
programme's climax: the moment when the finished surprise made-over garden is
revealed to the garden owner and the audience. It is here that the historical shift in the
'changed grammar' of the close-up is evidenced: rather than focusing on instructions
the camera hones in on reactions (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 55). It is through the close-
up on reaction that the climax of entertainment is achieved - has the personality-
interpreter, the audience asked, successfully mediated the 'right' garden ideas to the
pleasure/displeasure of the consuming client?
6 The advertising role played by lifestyle programmes and the expert personalities who
promote goods was arguably further enhanced when broadcast by the non-commercial ethos
of the BBC (Spittle, 2002, 64).