He's always making plans for Nigel
I have a friend at work for whom Gardener’s World is unmissable. She is a keen gardener, someone who knows her artemesia from her elbow. As you might imagine then, Friday evening is one of her television viewing highlights. Clear the diary, Monty’s on? No.
Clear the diary, Nigel’s on.
For professional reasons she must remain nameless. So let’s call her Daphne. Daphne is - how do I put this nicely - besotted with Nigel. Get talking to her in one of those water cooler moments and it becomes quite clear that she keeps a detailed log of his screen time, minute by minute, from programme to programme. On Monday she can tell you if it was a good Nigel week or a bad Nigel week.
The weeks when Monty teases Nigel with the tennis ball...? She's normally too upset to speak until Wednesday.
At Christmas she bought the book of Nigel, Monty Don’s chronicle about gardening with dogs and his faithful golden retriever(s).
I once tried to crack the joke – is it ‘Nigel - the paw-tobiography’. She wasn’t amused. Tumbleweed blew through.
Like the hardcore Harry Potter fans Daphne was probably waiting outside Waterstones at midnight on the day of release. I have no doubt that should you walk into the BBC production offices in Bristol, there will be numerous paintings of Nigel that she has sent in.
A lifetime ago I worked on a short-lived weekly trade magazine called Television Weekly and one of my earliest interviews was with GW producer John Kenyon at Pebble Mill in Birmingham (he also looked after the Farming programme, which was my main interest, having been to agricultural college) . I can remember him talking about the problems of recording Gardeners’ World with a single camera set-up and keeping continuity with the weather forever changing, while they lugged round the single camera.
That seemed difficult enough but add the unpredictable element of a couple of golden retrievers mooching about, as Nigel has now been joined by Nell, and it seems the current team have made a rod for their own back. I’ve noticed that often, as Monty comes into shot, he’s putting something back in his pocket, probably a doggie treat, as he leads the dogs through Long Meadow. It’s like a magician who hasn’t quite got his coin-palming off pat yet. This has becoming fascinating in itself.
And so now I’m obsessed with watching the dogs in the links between items to check the continuity and evidence of bribes, and so we’re both sat at home, Daphne going “Awww!”and me going “Aha!”
It’s going to be a tough act to follow. Whenever The Don decides he doesn’t want to do that tricky piece to camera one more time with drizzle dripping off his nose, whoever replaces him surely can’t drag in another set of cute companions. If the next presenter comes in with a Great Dane and a Jack Russell that does tricks there’ll be uproar.
Such has been the success of Nigel and Nell that it may lead to ‘programme creep’, a little bit like ‘mission creep’, with programmes starting to morph into other programmes. Maybe soon we will tune in to Crufts and find they've edited two minutes of gardening in between the links.
Maybe as I type this, Monty's entertaining big money offers from rival television organisations. How long will it be before Nigel and Nell start wandering into the linking or filler shots in Bake Off? That was a BBC institution once but the star presenter has been lured away by a big money deal.
Nigel can do so much more than lollop around the garden, hold a tennis ball, lie down and chew things. Joe Swift has proven that's a great way into presenting, but now Nigel needs to broaden his horizons. How about 'Nigel lies down in a lot of foreign gardens'. That might be fun. And I know someone who will definitely buy the book of the TV series...
