Rob Blackhurst

The Financial Times

November 4, 2006

As famous for his pot-boilers as his potting, the TV gardener has, says Rob Blackhurst, revisited his Yorkshire childhood in a memoir laser-guided on the Christmas market

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Alan Titchmarsh pulls his customary expression of boyish delight when confronted with a lunch menu in a day filled with television appearances and newspaper interviews: "I was up at half-past five today. You don't normally get fed on days like this, so this is nice."

With his stocky Ground Force physique intact and open-necked Jermyn Street shirt he looks much younger than his 57 years. Only a few weather-lines in the corners of his eyes from all those decades of mulching in February give away the truth.

Taking pleasure in simple things is a large part of the Titchmarsh brand, which in the past five years seems to have entered a rarefied television pantheon. From his days in the 1980s as resident gardener on breakfast television, via the pastel sofas, lurid ties and wobbly sets of Pebble Mill during the 1990s, he has become a kind of avuncular, honorary Dimbleby, wheeled out for royal occasions, national perennials and expensive, glossy nature programmes that air in prime time.

Reviewers like to prefix his name with the word "ubiquitous". As well as his hefty Natural History of the British Isles, he has fronted the Proms for the past three years and even popped up at this year's Children's Party at the Palace.

He's halfway through filming a two-years-in-the-making series on The Nature of Britain - to be aired next autumn.

"It's lovely stuff. We had a wonderful summer of footage. Hares boxing, watching otters and whales."

These days Titchmarsh is as well known for his potboilers as his potting plants. His novels are unashamedly populist, playing on his house-wife's "favourite" shtick with titles such as Animal Instincts and Love and Dr Devon that sell in industrial quantities. (Famously, his references to "liquid noises" in Mr MacGregor won recognition at the Literary Review Bad Sex Awards.)

Today Titchmarsh has ventured into the "big smoke" (as he still quaintly calls the capital) to talk about his new book of childhood memoirs, Nobbut a Lad,tracing the years from his birth in the Yorkshire Dales' town of Ilkley to his first job, aged 15, as an apprentice gardener in the local council parks department.

His previous life story, Trowel and Error, sold more than a quarter of a million copies; this volume is similarly laser-guided towards the Christmas market. Titchmarsh has that celebrated "Bluewater factor" - the ability to sell books in shopping centres to those who buy only one or two books a year as presents.

Nobbut a Lad is a gentle exercise in nostalgia that reeks of the linoleum and boiled cabbage of postwar austerity.

"Childhood in the 1960s is well documented, as are war childhoods," he says in that familiar musical voice. "But the 1950s is a forgotten period. It is a life when war had stopped, when we were still making do and mending, but the sun had come out - particularly in Yorkshire. It was a lovely time to be alive."

At times, Nobbut a Lad is almost a parody of northern working class life - a world of invalid spinster aunts, tin-baths, steam trains, chastisement with a whalebone hair brush, tea dances in Blackpool Tower ballroom, respect for "Doctor" and for greens grown in the backyard "because you knew where you were with them and they kept you regular".

Titchmarsh touches all the generic Yorkshire reference points. Last of the Summer Wine-style scenes of home-made go-carts hurtling down the hillside and sentences that sound like Alan Bennett ("The Bakers next door were childless - she a martyr to nervous headaches and he a special constable who directed traffic on Bank Holiday weekends.").

But beyond the comedy, it is the darker story of how those from terraced houses were left with a sense of unworthiness, that they should not get above their station.

Britain's most famous gardener seemed to spend much of his school career being pretty miserable. His parents - an archetypal Yorkshire combination of a strong mother and a silent father - were loving but their belief in the importance of "blending in" didn't leave him with much confidence.

He describes a sadistic moment at school in which a teacher turns the wizard's hat he was making into a Dunce's cap and forces him to wear it in the corner of the room.

Small and lacking in confidence, he was left behind by "logarithms and algebra". After failing his 11+, he left his secondary modern without even taking any exams.

I ask whether he's angry that no one spotted his potential. "Very little store was set by enthusiasm," he says. "And I was always an enthusiastic little boy.

"I was probably a pain in the arse, quite frankly, because my hand was always shooting up. But I was easily crushed."

Despite his 75 acres of field and wood, his Georgian farmhouse in Hampshire with a walled garden, and since 1999 his MBE, Titchmarsh hasn't been able to shake off that self-doubt.

"It's a cross to bear. I'm sometimes still ridiculously under-confident. I can turn my hand to quite a lot but I'm not at all sure that I'm good at anything. When everything goes alright I think 'You got away with it again'."

Throughout the interview he peppers our conversation with self-deprecations - "Being interviewed is horrible because you hear yourself going on and on." When I pause to give him time to eat his soup, he feels compelled to fill the silence by asking how I got into journalism.

In spite of the humiliations, leaving school at 15 was the making of him. Ever since working with his grandfather on his allotment and building his first greenhouse out of discarded wood and cheap polythene at the age of 10, the garden had been an escape.

Here, with seed-packets from Woolworths, he taught himself the rudiments of gardening, and dreamt of being able to afford his own rubber plant.

Titchmarsh firmly believes that this love of gardening was passed through the genes.

"Growing things is definitely an aptitude in the blood. Laurie Lee's mother was a great gardener and he said that she 'handled plants with a slap-dash love'. You watch people who are real gardeners handling plants and they're quite careless about it - they push and they prod and they shove and they poke. It's just like when you see Jamie Oliver with his thumb over a bottle of olive oil."

Once he entered the greenhouse professionally, it was only a few years before Titchmarsh shot up at beanstalk speed to the post of Gardens Supervisor of the Queen's Garden at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew. From there he became, in the mid-1970s, deputy editor of Amateur Gardening magazine, where he started writing columns. He did broadcasting on the side, experiencing his first taste of television when he reported on a plague of greenfly in Margate for Nationwide.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he slowly built up a BBC presence, eventually presenting Gardener's World and Songs of Praise. But it was not until 1997, 20 years after his first appearance on TV, that he reached a stratospheric, soap-star level of fame with a new makeover programme, Ground Force.

"We had 8m viewers. East Enders was the only programme that was beating us. And suddenly everyone knew who I was. I remember thinking 'OK this is what it will be like, so clear off or get used to it'."

Now that Ground Force has been exported to the US, he even has "builders shouting at me in Fifth Avenue and shoppers coming up to me in Bloomingdales saying 'I love your programme'."

In Britain Ground Force is blamed by some for a glut of home improvement shows and, particularly, for introducing decking to the British garden. Briefly, Titchmarsh is indignant. "Decking is better than crazy paving or shingle, which is what we had before."

He is relaxed about the claim, as with cooking, that fewer people are actually spending time gardening, even as they buy more books. "I don't mind if gardening is a spectator sport as long as people are interested. If they like it, they learn to grow and develop an affinity with it. That affinity will, hopefully, manifest itself as just being careful about what's out there. If Ground Force just made people a little more aware of their surroundings then it has done its job."

Titchmarsh has been dogged by the rumour that he was the inspiration for Alan Partridge, the excruciatingly banal daytime TV presenter created by Steve Coogan. There are a few elements of late-1980s Titchmarsh in Partridge: the multicoloured Fair Isle sweaters, the pudding bowl haircut, and the love of folksy truisms. But the comparison is unfair. Coogan's comic monster is utterly lacking in self-knowledge - which couldn't be further from Titchmarsh.

I ask if he minds criticism. "I used to get terribly hurt about it. Again, from childhood, you want to be liked by everybody."

Now he doesn't read his reviews but has memorised one of the better-crafted insults directed at him - by Victor Lewis Smith, the television critic - and repeats it slowly. "The five worst words in the English language are 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Alan Titchmarsh'."

A familiar conceit of interviewers is to try and find the real Titchmarsh behind the facade, only to conclude that he really is as cosy as a pair of old gardening trousers. I have my doubts. Anyone who dispatches books and TV series with Titchmarsh's seasonal regularity must have an iron discipline and drive beneath the jauntiness.

Just as we're leaving, unexpectedly, he changes tone and starts on what sounds like a radical political manifesto.

"I worry desperately about the state of the land in this country. At the risk of getting party political, we live in a Britain now that is very metropolitan. There's no indication from government that they have any affinity with the countryside - by which I mean anything that's green: fields, cowsheds, pig-farms, woodland, moorland, streams and rivers.

"Farmers are a tremendously undervalued and underrated part of society."

But, as ever, he pre-empts any criticism. "Sorry", he says with an embarrassed grin, turning to his press officer. "I'm talking the poor man to death."

'Nobbut A Lad: A Yorkshire Childhood' is published by Hodder & Stoughton