Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 90

Gardening personality-interpreters were mediators who packaged garden
lifestyle possibilities into styles and genres out of the symbolic repertoires on
offer in consumer culture (Chaney 2001). They provided symbolic ideas for how
viewers might interpret their garden aspirations and dreams. In particular, makeover
personality-interpreters marked a shift away from the polarised and singular notion
of purely instructional advice. They did not seek to encourage a single lifestyle,
rather the focus was to expand and cater for the translation of a range of fashionable,
architectural and artistic lifestyle improvisation concepts for use in the garden. Thus
the job of the personality-interpreter was to make elite artistic design knowledge
readable for the ordinary would-be gardener. The exclusion of ordinary people from
the sanctioned enclaves of legislative accounts was becoming socially obsolete: for
ordinary people as consuming clients were hailed, recognised and embraced in garden
lifestyle media. In line with Bauman's (1987) argument, these texts recognised the
sovereignty of the consumer, customers knew best, thus the onus was placed on the
consumer to choose from a range of ideas from the symbolic repertoires offered by
the culture industries.

Making lifestyle accessible: embracing ordinary subjects

The late 1990s saw ordinary people having a larger stake in primetime television,
as Moseley argued, 'There are simply more ordinary people on television' (Moseley
2000, 308). But if the choice of experts and presenters of the gardening media marked
a sense of openness towards those previously excluded from mainstream texts, the
members of the public who were included within them extended representational
possibilities even further. A whole range of people from different social groups - for
example gay men, the disabled, older people and black and Asian subjects - were
incorporated. As Brunsdon argued, the portrayal of ordinary England had changed on
British television - the diversity of ordinary people in Britain was being recognised
(Brunsdon et al. 2001, 57). The embrace of working-class subjects, however, was
rare in lifestyle programming; diversity existed in terms of age, gender, race and
sexuality, but it was, in the main, a lower middle-class kind of diversity.
Lifestyle largely replaced situation comedies and 'serious' high status programmes
in the primetime slot, but what programme makers chose to retain from those
previous genres however, were some of the main ingredients for the entertainment
required from 8.00 to 9.00: drama, conflict, emotion and stereotypes. The structuring
conventions of 'infotainment' took precedence over the Reithian values of
information and education. Conflict was so central, that some programmes featured
footage of video-diary confessionals made by the makeover subjects which charted
the highs and lows of their relationships with the makeover personality-interpreters. 7
In similar vein, the need to retain the sensationalism of discord often worked at the
political expense of how the previously marginalised were represented.
In an episode of Homefront in the Garden Anne McKevitt set out to makeover
a garden owned by two men who are subtly foregrounded by the programme as
being part of a gay relationship. From the outset this particular makeover is about

7 This was a generic feature of Homefront: Inside Out (BBC, 1999-).