At times it was a little extreme in its demands on the contestants; such as “you must display 3 radishes of equal sizes”, but on the whole I found the Big Allotment Challenge to be fun and light-hearted.
It was, dare I say, a nice little introduction to growing your own for the ‘black-fingered’ amongst the nation…
Maybe the programme was wrongly called ‘Allotment Challenge’ though, perhaps that title suggested something more serious, which might feature the real trials and tribulations of owning an allotment; endless slug problems, crap soil, etc, etc- but maybe that’s to come! There was some wind and rain, after all! I do think this programme was always designed to be a bit kitsch and just damn well tongue-in-cheek… heck, I’m a (fairly) good gardener, but I don’t think my allotment patch could ever look as neat as those ones. The aerial shots of the show site were pretty damn sparkly!
Dare I say, we sometimes take ourselves a little too seriously in the horticultural world… I wonder if professional master bakers look upon programmes like Great British Bake Off and fear they’ve been dumbed down…? Even though the show came across quite quirky, there was some horticultural know-how buried in there too, it was ‘hort-lite’ of course, but still made sense..!
The contestants might take a while to warm and settle, so I found it was a shame that 1 set has been voted off already! I really liked the ‘gardeners in heels’, and i might champion them, making up a banner and everything! Over the next few weeks, I think we’ll also be enjoying some great one-liners too, a fab one from last night was ‘fear keeps me whisking’ as the preserve-making got tense.
And, of course, who can forget ‘bloquets’ (flowers arranged by men!)
Let me know what YOU thought of the show in the comments section below!
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