Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 91

Anne's free-reign design decisions: Anne acts as the creative, moody and largely
silent authoress of the future of the garden and Martin and Trevor are subjected to
her plans. The programme is oppositionally structured by Anne's strident makeover
moves and the couple's increasing anxiety about how the garden is to be transformed.
This strategy of creating oppositional character positions generates an opportunity
to locate the ordinary subjects of the makeover into stereotypical roles. The camera
frequently indulges Martin who repeatedly complains about Anne not sharing her
makeover intentions, until eventually the viewer learns that he broke down and wept
with frustration at the office to his co-workers. It would be unthinkable to portray
a heterosexual man upset because he feels powerless - let alone out of control in
the garden - a sphere positioned so closely to the home and the domestic. Martin's
crying marks him out as so many conventional popular representations of gay
masculinity do: as the feminine 'wife' of the couple. The makeover is prepared to
include difference - perhaps even to embrace it - but the conventions of entertainment
are upheld at the expense of the politics of representation. In this way, the garden
makeover could be seen as a programme that was more concerned to fulfil the remit
of the situation comedy it has replaced in a bid to appeal to markets, than it is about
educating viewers about gardening.
In less popular enclaves, beyond the remit of the lifestyle makeover genre,
gardening people were portrayed with more respect. The emphasis in Channel
Four's Real Gardens for example was on the equal interplay between the knowledge
and research embodied by the presenter and the lived experience of the 'real'
gardener. Observer garden columnist and writer Monty Don, the over-arching
presenter, introduces the viewer to programme segments which consist of expert
visits to viewers' gardens. Vital to the ethos of Real Gardens was the manner in
which the expert practically gardens alongside the visited gardener. Accompanying
dialogue consists of a genuine exchange of knowledge between expert and gardener
as the two assess the aspects of the garden they work upon. In one programme
Monty Don gardens alongside a woman on her coastal garden in Guernsey. As they
fork through her compost heap, Monty foregrounds current research on the most
beneficial elements for the best results while she tempers the discussion with aspects
of her composting practice. Other moments feature the experts being tutored through
gardening practices that are entirely new to them. The exclusivity of the experts is
continually underplayed as they strive to present themselves as real gardeners on
an equal footing with the gardeners they visit. In these ways Real Gardens appears
to genuinely value the experience, the expertise as well as the actual gardens of
the gardeners they visit. Experts become lifestyle ethnographers, tempering their
expertise with lived experience while showcasing and translating garden projects for
audiences. In this way, even programmes which lie beyond the lifestyle makeover
genre appealed to markets using the levelling strategies of 'ordinari-ization'.
The 'ordinari-ization' of lifestyle television during this moment can be read as part
of the wider cultural move to help people to make the social and cultural transition
from 'ways of life' to consumer lifestyles (Chaney 2001). The egalitarian embrace of
a widening diversity of ordinary people, alongside the concomitant levelling down
of expertise in garden lifestyle programming, undoubtedly demonstrated a move to
mine new markets in the ever increasing shift towards consumer culture. But these