Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 103

either be tailored to fit the individual's needs or become a means of expressing the
individual. An episode of Homefront: Inside Out ( BBC, 1999-) for example, borrows
docu-soap conventions in order to construct a sense of 'Sharon' as an individual:
friends and work colleagues testify to her personality traits; we see footage of
Sharon interacting in the workplace; she is filmed living in the home and garden
spaces that are to be made-over; she is subject to stringent cross-examination from
both Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Diarmuid Gavin about her design preferences;
and she is asked to compile a pin board presentation of favourite images and objects.
All these elements construct a view of Sharon: her preferences, psychological
disposition, emotional life, and her personal and professional personae are subject
to scrutiny, for these are the characteristics which will govern the garden project - a
project which above all is a reflection of Sharon as an individual.
Yet as Skeggs argues, 'the project of the self is a Western bourgeois project'
(Skeggs 1997, 163). Seeing oneself as an individual is a liberty only those with
sufficient financial and cultural resources can afford; middle-class subjects have
access to the conditions which might enable them to turn their gaze inwards in order
to work on the self. The idea of formulating a character portrait in order to project
it onto one's personal space is a proclamation of individual self worth and value.
Public exploration of one's inner traits is based on the assumption that others are
innately interested (ibid.). The garden makeover tended to focus on clients whose
class position allows them the prerogative of egocentric self expression - doubtless
the typical makeover subject is already familiar with such practices, such as personal
therapy, yoga and the art class, which also promote the idea of narcissistic self
exploration. Middle-class subjects partake of individualism with the same confidence
as the middle-class body moves with disinterested ease through social space - as
though they are given entitlements.
To this extent, Sharon occupies a relatively privileged location as a middle-
class subject in a milieu similar to the one described above: as manager of a media
recruitment consultancy she enjoys a good deal of economic independence and
culturally she is accustomed to the trappings of an affluent consumer lifestyle. To be
sure, Sharon is afforded an opportunity to negotiate a means of expressing herself
through the aesthetic codes of her made-over garden via a genre which encourages
the expression of the self, but not, I would argue, without being subjected to the
gendered version of Sharon's individuality that the programme makers of Homefront:
Inside Out are anxious to construct. Sharon is entitled to bourgeois self-indulgence,
but only within the prescribed parameters of a version of caring, maternal and
emotionally vulnerable femininity.
Diarmuid and Laurence's assessment of the components of Sharon's personality
is constructed around a fundamental set of oppositions: her private home life and
her public work persona. Using Sharon's own video diary, footage of her in the
workplace, the testimony of friends and Sharon's 'likes and hates', the experts
conclude that Sharon is soft and vulnerable at home, but cold and hard at work. Yet
the footage we see of Sharon at work, (we see her answer the telephone and later
she discusses a computer question with a colleague) hardly justifies the adjectives
'icy', 'hard', and 'tough' - terms that purport to encapsulate her work persona.
Rather, these words are coined because Sharon in making relatively minor day-