Message from Celebrity Sell Out to the Daily Mail: this town aint big enough for the two of us. Well, kind of. You can still do all the usual hatemongering and gay-bashing, but let’s make one thing clear: you stay away from the light mockery and faux outrage of celebrity endorsement. That’s our turf.
Common garden crackers
Originally we were very excited by the Mail’s report on horticultural home-boy Alan Titchmarsh signing up to promote B&Q. If Middle England’s manual was going to do our job for us, we could just copy and paste their piece onto Celebrity Sell Out and call it our own (obviously we wouldn’t as that’s theft and there would be a nasty linger whiff).
But alas, the Mail was not mimicking our usual blend of gentle derision and poorly attempted humour. No, they had got their knickers in a twist over whether or not the 60-year-old presenter was breaking any BBC rules on commercial conflicts of interest. Sounds petty doesn’t it? It’s almost as if the Mail’s got it in for the Beeb.
Fear not, though, Celebrity Sell Out remains true to its cause. We will bravely ignore the potential conflict of interest issue (which the Beeb has said is not a problem), and soldier on with our usual snarky asides.
It was only last September that Titchmarsh was on these pages for his work with Jacobs Cream Crackers. Their ‘create a garden on a cracker’ line was fairly tenuous, whereas this time the collaboration makes a lot of sense. B&Q are launching a campaign to Get Britain Gardening (which, while it’s no Disasters Emergency Committee, is vaguely high up on the worthiness scale), and who better to front said campaign than Britain’s best known gardener?
Everyone wins here. B&Q get one of horticulture’s most recognisable faces (Charlie Dimmock, Titchmarsh’s erstwhile televisual companion, certainly had the most recognisable nipples, but B&Q probably weren’t looking for that sort of thing), and the presenter gets to widen his – and, in a way, the BBC’s – audience.
As he said himself: “I thought long and hard about signing up with B&Q. But they reach more potential gardeners than any other outlet in the country. What I have tried to do in 30-odd years on the box is to try and raise standards in horticulture and to reach more people.”
See he is doing it for the gardens? Bless his little turfy socks. And seeing as Titchmarsh apparently came top in a poll of who B&Q customers trusted for gardening advice, it seems like a match made in heaven (but with money).
So, er, well done everyone. Except the Daily Mail – they should leave us to deal with celebrities selling out. It’s sort of our thing. Even if we do go a bit soft now and again.
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