Is Adam Frost a Chuckle Brother?

You don’t tend to watch Gardeners’ World for knockabout humour but an item on the programme the other day was right up there with the Chuckle Brothers* for slapstick comedy.

GW's allotments tsarina, Frances, had finally returned to her Kent patch after spending the entire year avoiding it.

The producers obviously thought that having introduced this element to the show at the beginning of the year, regular viewers would wonder what had happened to it. Last year we were regularly backwards and forwards to the allotment plot in Bristol that she’d hoodwinked an eager production assistant into doing all the work on.

Every so often she would sashay along and pretend that it was an exciting joint venture between the two of them, while all along we knew she was slipping off to film 114 new episodes of ITV’s Love Your Garden, (a thin pretext for Alan Titchmarsh to hug pensioners) and leaving him to it.

In 2019 she had boldly declared she was going it alone, apart from the company of an obligatory small dog. There was a bit of seaweed collecting (sanctioned by the local council), a bit of ground preparation and that seemed to be that.

She would often appear in other people’s allotments, stealing flowers and vegetables, but like a wanderers cricket team, she seemed to have no home venue. Cut to much later in the season and a year without ginga Luke had yielded a much slimmer harvest on the wind-blown Kent allotment. There were a few cabbages, though, and they needed protecting from pigeons and cabbage white butterflies.

The answer to keep these regular garden pests at bay would be a small wooden frame covered in a fine mesh.

Those of us who love our gogglebox gardening will know that in Love Your Garden (Ground Force in everything but name) the women – that’s Katie Rushworth and Frances – do almost as much heavy lifting and DIY as the men. They may have ‘The Hof’ of gardening programmes, David Domoney, on hand to wear a check shirt and hold a spade, but it’s still Frances who gets up on a pergola and drills holes.

So it was a great surprise that Adam Frost should rock up in his motor to give her a hand making the pigeon-proof frame. Through the course of the item Adam hacked at bits of wood and drilled with all the confidence of a Year 7 pupil in his first woodworking lesson. His subtle use of brace-supports ably proving that he is to joinery what Anne Widdecombe is to tap dancing.

In 100 years’ time, the finished item won’t be presented on the Antiques Roadshow as a “typical example of early 21st century Frostiana”.

At the end of the piece, the director looked as though she/he was struggling to get Adam and Frances to keep a straight face when they presented the finished item to camera. And you couldn’t help thinking, 'that’s one day of their life they will never get back…'

* (RIP Barry)

** I'm sending the above publication - bought while compiling The Joy of Sheds - to Adam for future reference.