TV review: We're back growing our own

Suddenly, gardening is everywhere. Newspapers and magazines are featuring "grow your own vege" pieces.

On telly, where there used to be only Mucking In, now there's Te Radar's Off the Radar, and Close Up, which had such a response to its recent feature on easy vege growing that it had to put up extra info online.

But doesn't something strike you as odd? There is no actual dedicated gardening programme on free-to-air telly. Mucking In is a makeover programme, and Off the Radar is about self-sufficiency.

Since the demise of Maggie's Garden Show, there's been nothing truly useful for the striving green fingers to watch, short of turning to the Living Channel on Sky.

TV One made a cut-down version of Maggie's for a brief stint - so memorable I can't find its name - but it was high-gloss and skimpy on information.

Then there was an enjoyable romp with a garden game show, in which four couples worked four identical plots of land within a fixed budget, and strict time limits.

But none of that was proper gardening, in any educative sense.

Dumping a load of chocolatey compost here and there, sowing Potted Colour and strewing pebbles around a few flax bushes can give you a temporarily fashionable look.

But it's decorating, not gardening.

It's to be hoped that someone out there in TV land can persuade one of the channels to give a decent slot for a new show with meaningful content, since there's now an almost hysterical interest in growing your own veges.

A combination of world recession, greenhouse emissions trading and worry about vitamin content, genetic engineering and pesticides has found a therapeutic outlet here, and there must be a growing new audience. No longer is gardening an old fogey's habit.

Children are being taught about it through school food gardens, and 20-somethings are making with the trowel because it's trendy.

Popularity is often irrelevant when it comes to television scheduling, however. The first question to ask is: Would a gardening programme fit with the sort of image our advertisers want to align themselves with?

The second is: Can such a show find a sponsor? Up against the pestilence of body makeover shows on Friday night - for generations the gardening show night on New Zealand TV - wholesomely earthy bunches of newly yanked carrots simply wouldn't be a match for the wonders of Botox and what to do about a wobbly bottom.

Still, Off the Radar isn't a bad start, in terms of inspiring the average couch-sitter to bond a little with the backyard.

After episode two (TV One last Sunday), you wondered whether anything could be nicer than an outdoor-cooked, fresh, organic meal, after a day's energetic and enjoyable labour to produce the ingredients.

Well, yes, a cold beer, and some sort of - probably inorganic - pudding would have rounded it off nicely, Te Radar admitted. But it's an enjoyable call to arms for productive land-based pursuits, information-dense and good-humoured.

If you were worried that having a professional comedian would be an irritant, Te Radar blessedly keeps the showing-off to a minimum, as he seems genuinely overwhelmed with how wonderful a time he's having under canvas in a large paddock with chooks and cows for company (and a camera crew, but it's surprisingly easy to forget that).

The other unmissable TV gardening experience - which this reviewer has managed to miss most of, but it's bound to be repeated often - is Around the World In Eighty Gardens, which Sky's Living Channel is playing on Sundays.

It features British TV gardener and writer Monty Don - who is pretty much as lustworthy as the gardens he presents - touring some of the most remarkable, distinctive and beautiful gardens on every continent, from raked, stilted Asian gardens to confections of prairie grass.

In a completely different, inorganic and almost idiotic vein, Sky's UKTV has been replaying 1960s episodes of The Saint on weekday afternoons, and I defy anyone of any age not to find them thoroughly entertaining.

The plots are beyond lame by today's standards, and the characters less rounded than those you'd find in Tintin.

But they give you a blast of fashion - the clothes and cars - of the time. The dialogue is surprisingly sparkly. "Are you a model?" says a lustful young woman to Simon Templar. "Er, no, I think you'll find I'm actual-sized," smirks the debonair and slightly creepy Saint.

Roger Moore - later a memorable James Bond - in pale, ungrubby-able suits, fist-fights the villains, but never to the point of disarranging his Brylcreemed hair. And every villain is knocked unconscious with a single blow.

No Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis or Matt Damon character can manage that.

- © Fairfax NZ News