Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 87

her own television makeover programme Charlie's Garden Army (BBC, 1999-). She
went on to produce several books and sold her image for attachment to a range of
humdrum, commonplace ephemera from calendars to cups. In this way, lifestyle
programmes, merchandise and celebrities were able to make in-roads into the most
mundane enclaves of peoples' everyday lives.
Late modernity, as Chaney argues, has provided the cultural, social and economic
circumstances in which lifestyles are able to proliferate (Chaney 1996, 83). Lifestyle
synergy requires the distributive global network of the media and communication
industries, increased wealth and access to consumption and leisure which characterise
post-industrial societies. As these examples show, British media institutions were
selling lifestyle to audiences in a bid to urge people to make the transition from ways
of life to lifestyles. I argue that programme makers showcased the signs and images
of lifestyle through the appeal of what Brunsdon called the '“ordinari-ization” of
British television' (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 53).
Gardening People
Making lifestyle achievable: the appeal of the personality-interpreter
Much of the appeal of lifestyle programming emanated from the ordinariness expert-
personalities exuded. But perhaps more than that, experts came from a diversity of
backgrounds. Popular gardening celebrity-experts of the time, marked a new sense
of openness, legitimation and tolerance towards a set of previously marginalised
voices in mainstream programming. In terms of gender and age the popular media
embraced a new set of voices of expertise. There were as many female experts as
there were men. There was a balance of relatively young experts alongside the
more venerable. Similarly, the middle-class received pronunciation of some of the
over-arching presenters became the exception among a range of regional accents.
However, it would be a step too far to argue that ordinariness in class terms meant a
display of working-classness; being ordinary meant being lower middle-class in the
world of lifestyle programming. Interpreters with regional accents, who arguably
brought aspects of working-class life to their presentation, had their claims to
legitimacy bolstered using the display of their specialist knowledges. But despite
this, the voices of lifestyle were more ordinary than they used to be and they helped
to promote the accessibility and achievability of lifestyle projects.
More importantly, such experts were regularly seen to outstep traditional roles,
most especially in relation to gender. In an episode of Homefront in the Garden
for example, home interiors makeover personality Laurence Llewelyn Bowen took
to the sewing machine in order to make a set of cushion covers for a tree seat;
plant disease expert Pippa Greenwood offered the most scientific contribution to
popular gardening debate and Charlie Dimmock was easily able to out-lift her male