Gardeners’ Question Time has a new home, the BBC finally confirmed on Monday. About time, too. The Guardian ran a story about it last Wednesday, so it was hardly a secret.
Why report it here? Because the show is one of the few national radio programmes that could be of much use to anyone striving for self-sufficiency, answering seasonal questions about growing your own fruit and veg.
For the last 15 years the programme, broadcast at weekends on Radio 4 with a shortened repeat during the week, has been produced by Taylor Made Broadcast, and I had hoped that its move to Somethin’ Else would herald some radical changes. It’s all too smug and self-congratulatory right now, and the panel could do with livening up.
But it seems it won’t.
Although the BBC release doesn’t do anything to calm regular fans’ fears that their show will be torn apart, The Guardian points out what happened last time the Corporation messed with the format, which been broadcast almost unchanged since 1947.
Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer will be hoping to avoid a repeat of the controversy last time the programme changed hands in 1994.
The then presenting team… defected to set up a new gardening show on Classic FM, after the contract was awarded outside of the BBC… for the first time in its history.
With painful memories of the 1994 handover understood to be still fresh within Radio 4, the handover of the production contract… is expected to see an ‘evolution rather than a revolution’ of the Gardeners’ Question Time format.
Personally I’d be hoping for more about growing your own food and less about flowers and shrubs which would, after all, reflect the gathering trend for home produce.
I suspect, though, that were this to happen it would do so slowly, and certainly for the first few months after Somethin’ Else takes over we won’t notice any revisions.
But we can hope.
What would you include in your ideal self-sufficiency radio show?
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