In article , Sacha
wrote:

On 2/6/05 0:52, in article , "Janet
Baraclough" wrote:

The message
from Sacha contains these words:


My daughter in law braved the crowds - her first visit and she *loved* it,
so I'll ask her if she happened to spot it. I'm sure it would have been
mentioned, though.

Did anyone else think the BBC's TV coverage of Chelsea was dire,
again? Why won't they show us the actual show, in detail?

We don't have digital TV, which is the only place they offered "a tour
of each garden". For those of us paying full license whack for analogue
alone, over six days we saw the same bit of the same garden over and
over again ( a spiral path), some outdoor rooms apparently without
plants, a load of non-garden guff from Jenny Bond and the endless
excruciating talking-heads adolescent shoving and pushing between
Charlie and Diarmuid, or Diarmuid and Alan, with leaden repartee. YAWN.
Plus the usual whirl of computer graphics, silly angles, out of focus
plants without names, etc :-(


Dire is the word. It was awful - again. We were heartily sick of the
'personality puffing' that went on, day in, day out. Chelsea Flower Show
is about plants, gardens and those who design the gardens, to some extent.
It is NOT about Alan Titchmarsh and Diarmuid Gavin, Jennie Bond and Rachel
de Thame. And yet again, no names of plants on the screen most of the time.
Why can't the BBC employ someone who knows about gardening to direct
gardening programmes? If they did, they would realise that passionate
gardeners want to know what the name of a plant IS, so that they can find it
or discuss it with those who have it! (snip)

It has certainly been dumbed down to boost the prime time audiences but
in terms of the gardening universe, that might help to attract new
recruits to the hobby. But Diarmuid Gavin is so ill at ease, so
unnatural and so unintelligible that many would switch off I guess.

But technically I thought the coverage was much superior to last
year's, with better editing, better transitions and better handovers.
The traditional Chelsea trick of having a presenter momentarily static
before walking into shot on cue was thankfully hard to spot this time.