Saturday 15 November 2014

The real star of Gardeners' World is a golden retriever called Nigel

Okay, I admit it – I watch Gardeners' World on BBC2. I used to avoid it, but, after a  disastrous attempt to sex the show up led to plummeting ratings, they rehired the world’s most quintessentially English Englishman as lead presenter. Monty Don represents a sort of Platonic ideal of Englishness – soft-spoken, courteous, manly, doing practical things in the rain in trousers held up with braces. Then there are all those fabulous flowers, plants, shrubs, grasses and herbacious borders to ogle. Half an hour spent in this peaceful, lovely alternate reality and the world of twerking, Ed Miliband, dirty bombs and Asian rape gangs seems mercifully distant. But the real reason for watching the show is Monty’s companion, Nigel.

The programme-makers deploy the honey-coloured six-year old  golden retriever brilliantly. He’s just sort of there, as proper dogs tend to be. As Monty upends plant pots, dead-heads flowers (if that's what you do to them), slices open a tomato or gets stuck into a mound of compost, Nigel can be glimpsed rooting around the shrubs or chasing an insect or slobbering over his green tennis ball or just dozing on a path. Some of the shots are framed so he’s there in the background while Monty chats to the camera; there are occasional cut-ways of the noble beast; Monty will give him the occasional pat, as you do.


Because it’s all so charmingly understated and subtle (i.e. so English), I suspect Nigel has become as essential to the programme’s success as his human – to such an extent that Monty has to explain if he’s not in evidence (Nigel was poorly a few weeks’ ago, which had the whole nation fretting until he turned up hale and hearty the following week). Inevitably, Nigel gets sackloads of mail when he’s unwell (last year, he had to be nursed back to health after paralysing his hindquarters leaping for a ball – you can read about it in the Mail, here - very touching).

Just as Monty Don’s Longmeadow garden in Herefordshire has become a surrogate country garden for those of us who live in the city, Nigel seems to have become Middle England’s surrogate dog: he’s definitely mine.

I wonder if this would happen anywhere outside the Anglosphere. I can think of one place, actually. There was an Austrian TV series starring a police dog which proved so popular in Italy that, when the Austrians cancelled it, the Italians took over production and relocated Il commissario Rex (Inspector Rex) to Rome. Yes, I can imagine Nigel going down well in Italy.

11 comments:

  1. Haven't tried Gardeners' World but I did notice a year or so back that I had stopped reflexively turning off Gardeners' Question Time (GQT) when it pops up on the radio. Where else do you find an assembly of experts who know so much about their subject? And who can debate it amicably and with a sense of humour? And whose advice commands authority, unlike those shrill economists on TV? And where else do you find Latin being used un-selfconsciously?

    And then there's the GQT audience. The people who ask the questions. People from every walk of life whose paths start from every point of the compass, intersect at gardening where they share a passionate and practical interest, and then diverge again. It almost gives a good name to diversity. Not least because it's not the diversity which is of interest but what is shared. Rather like hunting, as its advocates inform us ignorant townies, that's another "little platoon".

    This is Scruton country par excellence. The concept of home, and home being rooted in the earth and the landscape, and "we" as opposed to "I". After the uncontrolled, furious aggression he inspires or used to inspire in the left-wing media, it's staggering how gentle his picture is of what makes sense of our lives. Class struggle? Maximised utility? No. Nothing sacred there. Gardening.

    I was debating the government cloud with a chap on Twitter. Nothing could be less human. Then he tweeted a picture of a flowerbed in his garden that he'd been working on. Not to me. Not to anyone. He just tweeted it. It was looking right and he was proud of it. He's a human.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Excellent post, Scott and a brilliant piece of analysis and writing, Mr Moss. A Link between gardening and the parenting instinct, the British love of order out of chaos, is sport more of a unifier than a divider. I must stop reading this blog last thing at night.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for that, ex-KCS. I assure you that my intention is always to help people sleep. The record of success so far is ...

      Delete
    2. Agreed re D. Moss's contribution. I can't resist quoting from Noel Coward's script for tne play and film, "This Happy Breed". Classic lower-middle class conservative family man Frank Gibbons is talking about socialist agitators: “Where they go wrong is trying to get things done too quickly, and we don’t like doing things quickly in this country. It’s like gardening. Somebody once said we was a nation of gardeners. And they weren’t far wrong. We like planting things and watching them grow, looking out for changes in the weather… What works in other countries won’t work in this one. We got our own way of settling things. It may be a bit slow, and it may be a bit dull, but it suits us all right. And always will.”

      I must take up gardening, one of these days.

      Delete
    3. I meant, D.Moss, that your contribution was brilliant - not that it put me to sleep!

      Delete
    4. That's very kind, thank you, but the brilliance is all Scruton's and Burke's.

      Delete
  3. I read the line containing the words " a sort of Platonic ideal of Englishness – doing practical things in the rain in trousers held up with braces." I had a long think about it and then had a fit of the giggles. Do you have a list of these things that Englishmen do in the rain in their special trousers? For some reason, I keep thinking about Christopher Biggin and his inane smirk and Patrick Leigh Fermor running around kidnapping Nazi generals. All very surreal.

    David Moss. I too listen to Gardner's Question Time in spite of being entirely ignorant of the subject. Knowledgeable and civilized people eager to share information [as opposed to opinion] without a trace of ego. Very refreshing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I hate to think what Christopher Biggins might get up to in the rain or, indeed, what might be "special" about his trousers. As for the Patrick Leigh Fermor/Monty Don type of Englishman, you'll have to watch Gardener's World to find out.

      Delete
    2. An oldie but a goldie from the Guardian review of Michael Scammell's biography of Arthur Koestler:

      Koestler never really belonged anywhere, including Britain, where he spent the majority of his time after the war. This was often a source of strength during his lifetime – it meant he could rove from country to country and immerse himself in whatever was happening. But in the longer term, writers need the backing of a home nation to flourish. Writers like Orwell and Camus, both of whom Koestler was friendly with, are of course today very much national figures. Koestler, by contrast, remains oddly rootless. At one point, Scammell tellingly quotes the critic Raymond Mortimer on why Koestler's writings, though fascinating, were also oddly "dislikable". It's because, Mortimer wrote, they neglected "the necessity or even the existence of gardening".

      Delete
  4. Love this. You've nailed the Nigel-Phenomenon in five clever paragraphs, Scott.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks very much Steve - I enjoyed your blog, too:
    http://gardenlife.stevewasserman.co.uk/

    ReplyDelete