TV Review:I've never trusted dahlias; loud red shouts in the suburban gardens of my childhood, they always produced a scurrying earwig as soon as you put your curious nose to them, writes Hilary Fannin.
My horticultural immaturity has not lessened, and although I have eschewed hysterics by the rockery, mummyish gardening programmes with their commands to prune your petunias and cauterise your crysanths make me want to dress up in PVC and go out and get hammered. I blame, entirely unreasonably, tetchy Alan Titchmarsh, who, before he tells me where to put my schizanthus, should be provided with a gnome hat and cast in concrete.
Now, it could simply be that I am reaching the age where Saturday-night larks involve embracing the rosebush with a gin in one hand and secateurs in the other, but . . . I think I'm ready to eat my hydrangea. Monty Don's brilliantly conceived new series, Around the World in 80 Gardens, is an absolute joy. From the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City to the surreal beauty and deep madness of Las Pozas at Xilitla in the Mexican jungle and onwards to an ecological revolution in the crumbling grandeur of Havana, Don's first programme promised a superb series, a blossoming travelogue that will take him (lucky bugger) across the globe, challenging the very idea of what a garden is.
Not necessarily the most articulate of presenters, he flailed around almost endearingly in search of words to describe Las Pozas, aristocrat Edward James's unique jungle folly, but his passion for his subject was palpable and his anecdotes affectionate. (James apparently chose to cultivate his particular patch of jungle when, on an excursion there, his friend, having bathed in a waterfall, lay naked on a rock to dry off in the sun, only to be suddenly and completely buried under a cloud of blue butterflies.)
In Havana, Don found inspiration in a collective movement towards self-sufficiency, which has led to the city's wastelands sprouting allotments and gardens that help to feed its beleaguered yet vibrant population. It is a movement which, if emulated in other urban centres, would have a positive impact on the environment, and it is one that Don had no trouble finding the language to endorse.
Anchored to a drizzling Irish Sunday, Around the World in 80 Gardens is escapism on a magnificent scale, and well worth watching even if, like me, you're a serial aspidistra killer.
AM I THE only person in the world who didn't know Samantha Fox was lesbian? There is a certain poetic justice to Fox's sexual orientation - the girl was dribbled over by the lads (albeit at her own instigation) for most of the 1980s, as far as I can remember, but will remain, to the majority of her fans, as distant and unprocurable as a soggy page three blowing in the wind. Now in her early 40s and still working, Fox seems like a lovely lass, warm, sweet, protected by her manager and long-term lover, Myra. Her life (despite 100 sit-ups a day) is cocooned and harmonious.
So . . . why the woman would volunteer to share a week of her tender existence with the world's dreariest hamster-eater is anyone's guess. Celebrity Wife Swap is back, kicking off with a romp of incompatibility in which Fox decamped to the pastel-toned rural perch of a dazed Freddie Starr. The vermin-muncher is now 64 and doing around 25 gigs a year in regional theatres, although quite what he does in them remained unspecified.
"Just the right side of catatonic" was how a friend once described my drowsy infant son, and I'm tempted to apply the phrase to Starr, although his catatonia is of the more lugubrious variety, heavily laced with nicotine and some deeply unappealing sweatpants. Starr seemed a depressing man. He is now on his third marriage, this time to Donna, a pleasant woman he met while she was working in a furniture store and with whom he has a beautiful baby daughter (who looks to have cornered the family's charisma gene).
"I'm a loner - my happiest time was after my last divorce," grumbled Starr, which set things up nicely.
After swapping households, Donna, who normally operates on four hours' sleep a night between exhaustive spells of cleaning, minding the baby and catering to Freddie's every whim (possibly in an effort to spare him the indignity of standing up in his awful baggy pants), got to hang out with Myra and a bunch of convivial platinum blondes in classy restaurants.
"I'm seeing eclectic everything," Donna gamely proclaimed, in response to the genteel, breasty nude hanging on Myra and Sam's bedroom wall.
Poor Sam, meanwhile, had the unenviable task of changing nappies and babysitting Freddie. Predictably, Fox's feistiness and Starr's paranoiac instability soon got the better of both of them, and Donna became the fall-guy in absentia for all the funny guy's woes.
"This is the finish of me and Donna, this is. This is the finish," Freddie gabbled manically when Sam tried to make him stand up and approach the Hoover. The programme was an unexpectedly fascinating, if bitter, insight into the fragile world of an ageing B-lister. Lock up your hamsters.
'NO OTHER ANIMAL has such difficulty knowing what it should eat," said Michael Pollan on Newsnight this week. Pollan, author of In Defence of Food, the new anti-fad diet bible, advises that we shouldn't eat anything with ingredients we can't pronounce, which might be a bit of a problem if you're holidaying in Mongolia but as a general principle seems sound enough.
In this self-flagellating new year period, food and its innumerable human casualties continue to clog up the schedules, attempting to put us off our dangerous suppers with endless footage of suety bellies and enormous ripe and dimpled bottoms.
Another example of saline-solution TV, Supersize v Superskinny is firmly encased in the low-rent end of the goggle-box health market. An uneasy confection of the dire Gillian McKeith (who is on a campaign to reduce the girth of the average British butt) and Dr Christian I'm-on-the-television-look-at-my-quiff Jessen (who supervises as a skinny person and an obese person swap diets in "the feeding clinic" - which looks awfully like a short- term rental in west London with a big red weighing scales in the livingroom), this is a regurgitation of every artery-clot half-hour you've ever witnessed.
This week a thin girl called Yasmin gagged on "diet-dodger" Daryl's fried black pudding and Daryl (who moonlights as Robbie Williams impersonator Blobby Williams singing Let Me See the Menu) tried to find her rice cakes under his copious chins.
There was, of course, the usual excited description of "stools" (not the kind you covet after work on a Friday), dozens of women in their knickers, and giant plastic test tubes full of the participants' average weekly food intake, which made one want to throw up.
With the endless swill of "health" programmes propping up a €1.2 billion-a-year diet industry, expect the barrage of bikini terrorism to intensify.
ONE FOOD PROGRAMME that doesn't make you barf is RTÉ's satisfying new series, Guerrilla Gourmet, which this week featured chef Denis Cotter, proprietor of Cafe Paradiso in Cork. Cotter looked like the archetypal vegetarian, exuding a skinny, woolly calm as he searched a local wood for sorrel and pig nut. One just could not imagine this man eating anything with a face.
Addressing the beef committee meeting in Bandon, Cotter's credo, which is to work with fresh, natural, local vegetable produce to create fantastic food, may have largely fallen on deaf pink ears. Undaunted, however, he invited the beef traders to his one-night-only restaurant in Bandon Mart, where the robust cattlemen and their somewhat more adventurous wives dined on, among other things, gnocchi (gwhatti?), nettles and vegetable tempura.
The series is a response to a movement which sees chefs leaving the comfort of their restaurant kitchens and creating culinary events in bizarre or unusual locations, in the process developing a new clientele. "Very nice, very filling" was the final judgment of Bandon's livestock trade, one of whom - with the revolutionary zeal of a woman who has just discovered the persuasive power of a courgette - pronounced the end of cattle sales in her home town.
Good moos for Cotter then.