Alan Titchmarsh: Man or Monster?

Thinking that I was in time for Top Gear, I turned to BBC2 a bit too early last night, forgetting that their highest rated show (and one of the few things the BBC are getting right at the moment) had been postponed in favour of the snooker. However, my disappointment was lessened a bit by the discovery that BBC2 were broadcasting a new wildlife series, The Nature of Britain, which has always been another of the things that they do well. In fact, saying that the BBC does wildlife well is like saying the Pope knows his Catholicism. In God’s great plan: the two were made for one another. And, after all these years, both are just as predictable. You know what to expect: great photography, good writing, a broadly conservative presentation, and the occasional day of judgement usually involving a rigged telephone poll.

I joined the show late, but, within a minute, cows were defecating in high definition in the corner of the room. Perfect viewing after my Sunday dinner, I thought, though not everybody else in the room was equally smitten. They made their excuses and left me to watch the rest of the show. I surprised myself that I made it to the end. Not because of the defecating cows, you understand, but because of the chap who provided the soundtrack.

David Attenborough’s announcement that he was retiring from making BBC wildlife documentaries caused much debate as to who was going to get his job. Last night, I witnessed the apparent winner. Alan Titchmarsh. I think the defecating cows were robbed.

I’m ashamed to say that I always had a soft spot for Titchmarsh back when he used to dig people’s gardens for a living. He was twee, cosy, comfortable, somewhat patronising, prissy, at times pretentious, but generally amiable. Ground Force was a terribly watchable show as Charlie Dimmock would stand, hands on hips, her unharnessed chest thrown out, leaving Titchmarsh to make some wry comment about the cold weather. It was the programme that always left me feeling the same towards him as I feel about Christians in general: that they do nobody any harm and have a comfortably line in knitwear.

Only, like my tolerance for Christians, I have a line across which men called Titchmarsh should not cross. Much as I don’t like to be woken on a Sunday morning to be asked if I believe that Christ is my redeemer, nor do I like to see men getting a bit big for their Wellington boots.

It all began when Titchmarsh started to turn up and stick his fingers in our whole cultural buffet. He began to write novels with dire gardening puns in the title (Trowel and Error). Then he did radio, his own talk show, and, more recently, turned up hosting the Proms for the BBC. He was even rumoured to be in running to take over Countdown after Des Lynam was run out of Leeds. Titchmarsh was clearly elbowing his way into anything that required a man of moderate intelligence, fiercely middle-class tastes, and a ‘nice’ personality for whom the oldies would happily make sponge cakes. He’s the sort of man that if Thora Hird wanted to send messages back from the other side, she’d channel through Alan. (And before you do it, I’ve already sent the BBC my idea for a show called ‘Channeling Through Alan’. I’m told they’re considering the idea.)

Now that he’s just settled for becoming the face of wildlife shows on the BBC, Titchmarsh is set to become ever present on our screens. But to me it’s like Ronald McDonald has been given charge of a petting zoo.

I don’t wish any harm to the man but I rarely find myself calm after any time in his company. His use of bathos is the most galling, in that he has this way of trying to sound martial, grand, and epic but ends up sounding like a tax inspector having an enema. It usually involves him quoting some poetry (he loves his poetry), his voice wallowing in the luxurious description of some great English scene, to which he then usually adds his own: ‘you bet…’ or ‘you can say that again…’

There’s a fun game I've invented which you can try to help make Titchmarsh more bearable in which you try to write your own Titchmarsh script. Take any lines of English poetry and complete them in the style of the great Alan. I’ll start you off with two examples. First, Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills

‘I bet you did. And while Bill Wordsworth was larking about on all those Lakeland hills, perhaps dropping in to see Mr. Norris’s excellent shop, selling original mint cake, he must have wondered what a cloud would think if it saw all the people flocking to the Lakes…’

Or Shakespeare, from Henry V:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

'By heck! Bet he’s a lot of fun come a Monday. But, you know, perhaps old Bill Shakespeare has a point… This war business isn’t at all as messy as we’ve been told it is. A bit of victory here, a spot of honour there. And before you know it, a lovely field full of bright red poppies, luxuriating under a mid-summer sun.'

He was at it again last night, after the cows had stopped defecating. The BBC Wildlife department had strapped a camera to a swan or something with a similar wingspan, and sent it soaring up over the countryside. Alan had then added his own special flourish, by quoting Auden, or Byron, or Pam Ayres, for all I know... I can't say which. I was too busy strangling the life out of the sofa’s cushion.

It sounds very mean spirited of me to criticise a man who has made a virtue out of being pleasant but I say he’s a poor role model for a nation aspiring to make a name for itself in the twentieth century. While Titchmarsh fills our minds with ideas of lounging around in hammock in the garden, the Chinese are out there building warships and stockpiling germs. While Titchmarsh is encouraging us to reach for our copies of Milton and Shelley, the North Koreans are returning their copy of ‘Nuclear Fission for Dummies’ to the Iranians. While Titchmarsh rambles, the country sleeps. We should take this as a warning and put him back to doing what he does best. Digging deep bunkers in shrubberies.

Club Gabby

I had an odd dream last night. I was on my way to see Clive James, who for some inexplicable reason, was living the life of a mysterious recluse in a Kowloon shanty town. I had to go through some strange Daliesque doorways to reach him, which led me to a glass elevator that began to rise diagonally over a landscape of 1930s New York, sepia tinted and wholly photographic. When I reached Clive, I found him to be extremely pleasant and a very gracious host, despite living in squalor with an Argentinean housekeeper and a large Afghan hound with long blond tresses which kept attacking me whenever I clenched my fists.

That’s when I began to hear the sound of clicking.

Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was coming from my hips. Clive thought so too. A lifetime spent doing high kicks and hip thrusts can wear a stripper’s hips away in half the time of your average Premiership footballer. It’s why so many of us have so much titanium inside us by the time we’re thirty that we're less human than a Terminator. Clive told me that it was an omen of what’s to come and a reminder to keep myself well oiled and my joints lubricated.

Only then did I wake up and realise that there was nothing wrong with my hips, which were running as silky smooth as ever. Clive had also disappeared, which was the biggest disappointment because I had so many things to ask him.

Then I heard the clicking again and realised that not all my dreams were insubstantial. Some mysterious clicking force had descended on the apartment while Clive James had been explaining the mysteries of literary punditry to me.

I looked at the clock. It was horribly late for a weekday morning, nearly half-past eleven, but then I remembered that last night I’d over indulged myself with the alcohol and a sad French film involving the innocent murder of young rabbits. Pulling on a fresh thong, I walked through the apartment, following the sound which I could now clearly tell was coming from the living room.

‘Whow!’ said a voice as I turned the corner past the bathroom. ‘Check out those buns! Rock solids at twelve o’clock!’

I turned around and found myself face to face with a young woman wearing a long black leather overcoat and a beret perched on the top of her head.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, oblivious to the fact that she was looking at my thong as though she was having a religious experience. It happens to me all the time.

When she straightened herself up she resembled a rather lascivious stick of liquorice.

‘I’m Jonjo,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

I thought her question defied reason so I chose not to answer it. ‘And what are you doing in my apartment?’ I asked.

‘Hey! Stay cool!,’ she replied, guiltily waving her arms around like Eve juggling invisible apples. ‘Don’t get your thong in a… in a…’

‘Twist?’ I suggested.

‘Hey! Cool. Twist, yes, twist. Don’t get it in a twist.’

‘And I asked what you’re doing in my apartment? And what the hell is that clicking?’

‘We’re here to celebrate words!' she said. 'You know? How great they are… How much we enjoy using them to… you know… to express… you know... stuff…’

‘We?’

She waved her hands ambiguously. ‘Don’t get plural on me. I is we.’

That ‘I is we’ bit was enough for me. I turned my back on Jonjo and walked into the main room.

Sitting on the floor, around the sofa, across the chairs and some sitting on the window seat, were an assortment of the oddest people you’re ever likely to find gathered in a stripper’s apartment on a Thursday morning. They were completely oblivious to my presence as they were too busy clicking their fingers as they gazed at the figure standing at the middle of the room.

It was Gabby, holding my copy of the English Auden in one hand and a large crocus in the other.

‘The crowing of the cock’, she said – or more precisely read – ‘though it may scare the dead, call on the fire to strike, sever the yawning cloud, shall also summon up the pointed crocus top, which smelling of the mould, breathes of the underworld…’

At which point the crowd began another chorus of clicking and Gabby danced around in a circle waving the crocus over their heads as though it were a magic wand.

‘Ahem,’ said the only cock in the room qualified to crow.

Gabby turned to me and smiling hugely waved the crocus at me.

‘Morning Chippy!’ she squealed.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I asked, in no mood to be won over by a high pitched Romanian with a crocus. My injured foot was beginning to throb and I could still feel the teeth of an imaginary Afghan hound in my arm. Even the memory of Clive’s reassuring words to his dog (‘it’s only rubber, Mildred’) could do nothing to calm my agitation.

‘Hey, is it time to get down to our undies?’ asked a woman sitting on the end of the sofa. ‘That would be so cool. So cool and Frank O'Hara...’

‘Well I’m not joining in,’ replied a gaunt man in black sitting beside her. He was giving me one of those looks as if to suggest he was in awe of the Chipster’s perfectly honed body. ‘There’s always somebody who wants to bring muscle to a gathering of minds…’

‘Who are these people?’ I asked Gabby.

‘My poetry club,’ she said and anointed them all with a wave of her crocus.

‘What?’

‘Oh, you’ll get to know all the names,’ she said. ‘They’re here to read poetry. Aren’t we, everybody?’

The room filled with more of that insufferable clicking.

‘Will you all stop that?’ I snapped. ‘And what’s that you’re reading?’

She held up the book. ‘Oh, I took it from your poetry shelf,’ she replied. ‘We play poem game.’

‘A poem game?’

‘Like drinking game but it involves poems.’ She looked at my face and must have recognised the look of mild curiosity. ‘We take turns,’ she began to explain.’ We each pick a poem at random and then we read it. Then we rip it out and eat it.’

‘You do what?’

‘It’s poetry, Chippy! You wouldn’t understand.’

‘You know,’ said a voice from the crowd. ‘We internalise the mystery… It's ruminatio of the word...’

‘You’ve been eating my English Auden?’ I sobbed, snatching the book from her crocus scented fingers. ‘Do you know how much this cost? It’s a Faber & Faber…’

‘And very tasty it was too,’ said a man sitting on the window seat. He was picking his teeth with his little finger. ‘I’ve just eaten the Night Mail and it went down lovely,’ he said. ‘That passage between Beattock and Glasgow went really smooth.’

‘It was all downhill,’ said some wit from the sofa. I glared at the gaunt man before I flipped through the torn edges of my ruined volume. All the shorter verse were gone and some sections of the longer poems had teeth marks where somebody had nibbled away the page, sometimes almost up to the spine.

‘You’re all heathens,’ I cried as I threw the book to the floor. And then, without another word, I turned my thong on the crowd.

‘Cool cheeks, man!’ said a voice to my rear but I gone past the point where a sane man cares anymore. Soon, my head was buried beneath the cold cotton fabric of my pillow. I was back in bed again, oblivious to the sound of the clicking fingers, which now marked the digesting of another classic of the English canon.

I consoled myself by trying to imagine what Clive James might say about the terrible age we live in.