2021-02-04 21:46:52 | Your Garden Made Perfect is the televised version of watching a couple pick out curtains 

Your Garden Made Perfect had Laura and Demi, a nice couple with a lovely big house in Hertfordshire, who, we were encouraged to believe, lived in constant anguish because of their “unloved, unused” back garden. Sorry, “plot”. Gardens are called plots here. No one explains why.

Laura and Demi’s back garden was, to most people’s eyes, spacious, well-maintained and rather nice. Not to Laura and Demi, however, who longed for a “serene” space where they could properly unwind. The garden was clearly used and loved by the couple’s three daughters, though we were lead to believe this was a bad thing. The garden was “packed with kids’ chaos”, said presenter Angela Scanlon, darkly. The camera lingered ominously on a discarded shoe. “I feel like I’m in a tunnel,” said Demi, suffering. Chaos.

A mere £33,000 transformed the plot into a very lovely and far more adult-pleasing garden, but if you spent £33,000 on your garden and it didn’t look terrific, you’d be miffed.

More entertaining was Tom in Stockton-on-Tees, who had only £1,500 to transform his genuinely dowdy back yard, though the success of this half of the show was down to the charismatic garden designer Joel Bird, a no-nonsense Scouser dressed as the bass player in a skiffle band. Now, he’s the kind of person who’d push Laurence Llewelyn Bowen into a paddling pool. BBC execs, take note.