Alan Titchmarch interview: Growing pains

Published on Thursday 27 November 2008 10:17

HE was a sensitive, underachieving, child. Now he's one of our most popular broadcasters and a bestselling author. But if Alan Titchmarsh has cracked success, some things are less easy to throw off

WAITING for Alan Titchmarsh in the bar of Brown's Hotel in London, I can't help thinking I've picked the wrong seat. Tucked into a booth, I'm surrounded on three sides by a collection of Terence Donovan black and white photographs. There are women in uniforms and vertiginous high heels, skirts hitched up to show the top of stockings, breasts visible through gauzy blouses, and gritty portraits of men in camel coats who look like they might've known the Krays. Could there be a less appropriate backdrop for the avuncular king of daytime TV and best-selling author of romantic fiction?

When Titchmarsh eventually arrives – 40 minutes late – in an expensively perfumed cloud of aftershave and the soft swish of cashmere, he doesn't mention the photographs. But we do talk about sex.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. He writes romantic fiction, after all. In fact, he picked up an award for the best bad sex in one of his novels (although the "liquid sounds" were, he insists, meant to be funny and anyway, the award was actually meant for Sebastian Faulks, who had the good sense not to turn up to collect it). Recently, a "sex strand" with Julie Peasbody has been included in his afternoon chat show, he tells me. But before you start ripping asunder your idea of Alan Titchmarsh, imagining him as some kind of insatiable lothario, you needn't worry.

"I feel a little bit like ooh, I don't know if I should be doing this," he says, about the slot he does with Peasbody. "She's very good at it, though, and so we've got away with it and it's surprised the pants off me. No pun intended," he giggles.

And just like that, Titchmarsh, the nation's favourite gardener, master of the daytime sofa and High Sheriff of the Isle of Wight, is back on safe ground.

If he were a drink, he'd be non-alcoholic, if he were a kiss, he'd be a peck on the cheek. There's a cosy, hand-knitted wholesomeness about him, although the pinky rings and silk-lined coat he's wearing today hint at a certain vanity. Millions of fans (mostly women) love him but his detractors struggle to stifle a yawn. And it's what rankles with the man himself, because that's not to say that all is as meets the eye when it comes to Mr Titchmarsh.

Ostensibly we're meeting to talk about his latest romantic novel, Folly, but undoubtedly more interesting is the man himself.

Titchmarsh, 59 (he'll be 60 in May), is at the peak of his career. After ten years of Pebble Mill at One and stints on Gardeners' World and Ground Force, he's moved into the premier league with his own chat show, as the face of glossy, high-profile series on BBC television, and with a Sunday night slot on Radio 2. His novels sell by the supermarket trolley-full, too.

He's been married for more than 30 years ("we're companionable, I suppose") and has two daughters, Polly, 28, and Camilla, 26, whom he "loves to bits". He's never been happier, he says, but it wasn't always this way.

Titchmarsh began life as an oversensitive underachiever. Bullied at school, he left at 15 with only one O level, in art. So how did he transform himself from shy, sensitive Yorkshire lad into TV star, by way of a gold medal at Chelsea and a place on the Sunday Times bestseller list? Surely there must be a steely core of drive and ambition beneath that sweetie pink shirt?

There were "revelatory moments" he says, modestly. The first was when he started working as a gardener at the age of 15 and realised he had an aptitude for it. "When I did City & Guilds day release I was, for the first time in my life, top of the class instead of being just under halfway down," he says. "It's that moment when you think, I am good for something."

The young Titchmarsh enjoyed his success and it pushed him to achieve more.

"I was going to say I didn't have an inferiority complex but, looking back, I did, because up to that point I hadn't been good at anything so how could I have had anything else?" he asks. "In order to avoid an inferiority complex you have to be good at something and I hadn't yet found what I was good at."

For a man who says he doesn't indulge in self-analysis ("therein lies ruin") he's good at it. He's written two volumes of memoirs – Trowel and Error and Nobbut a Lad – which you couldn't really describe as exercises in introspection, but which did allow him to return to his upbringing and to ponder on how it shaped him. It's a theme he's keen on. "So much of my life now is governed by my childhood and how I felt then," he says, "Things I learned then that I don't want to lose." I ask him if he's nostalgic (listen to his Radio 2 programme, Melodies for You, and you'd be forgiven for thinking the question redundant) but he says no.

"I don't think nostalgic as much as fond, fond of what happened," he says. "Apart from the bad bits at school and whatnot, which one tends to blank out.

"I've never been happier than I am now, all round: family, career – I'm having a wonderful time, so it's not that kind of nostalgia, but I do remember things with fondness."

Titchmarsh's childhood, he says, was happy, if a little reserved. His parents – his father was a plumber, his mother, a housewife – were huge figures in his life.

"I had no doubt that I was loved," he says. "It wasn't that kind of upbringing. But it wasn't hugely demonstrative. My dad did just enough. I can still remember now, and it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, if he was watching telly and I came and sat down on the floor nearby and was leaning back, he'd rub his hand in my hair." He chokes up, wafting his hand in front of his face as he blinks back tears; the perfect, empathetic daytime host.

Has he been a different father to his two daughters, as a result of his own upbringing?

"Much more physically demonstrative," he says. "I have a great relationship with my kids. I love them to bits. And as they've got older, it's got better. They're lovely to me, they take the mickey out of me. It's the perfect parent-child relationship, it's what I always hoped I would have and I'm really thrilled I've managed to get it. I'm really lucky."

I'm not sure that Titchmarsh is the type to think of himself as someone with a persona (I tell him this and he doesn't choose to enlighten me) but he has spoken in the past about the burden of being an everyman, of not wanting to do anything that would clash with his wholesome image.

"I am aware of not letting people down because in a way, as everyman you become their representative," he says. "It's not a burden but it does give you a sense of responsibility. But I don't want it to emasculate me. I don't want it to sound as though I don't have an opinion.

"My values appeal to a lot of people. I've worked that out. And that is why this afternoon chat show has worked because I can only be me on that. It's about being true to yourself. If you happen then to discover that you appeal to a lot of people, then you become aware of not letting them down or of hoping that you won't, as distinct from being bland and not having an opinion about anything."

Accusations of banality obviously hit a nerve with Titchmarsh. Well, they would. There can't be many people who'd enjoy being credited with being at least part of the inspiration for Steve Coogan's comedy creation, Alan Partridge. It's worse for Titchmarsh, though, because being liked is important to him. It always has been.

"Lifelong curse," he says, with a dead-sounding laugh.

Really?

"I think you're born with it," he says, nodding his head. "I think there are people who don't mind, but I do. I'm not self-analytical, I don't believe in over-analysing, but I suppose if one did, it would go back to one's upbringing where you were anxious to please your parents, and I was."

Titchmarsh's father died when his son was 37, in 1986. His mother died in 2002.

"I remember being crushingly aware when she died that there was nobody left to prove anything to, which was an enormous sadness," he says. "I had wanted to vindicate their belief in me, in letting me leave school at 15 and become a gardener. It was important to me that they gave it their stamp of approval."

Then, as though he is suddenly aware of how he sounds, he checks himself. "I could deny this," he says, "rise above it and say it isn't there, but if I'm honest, it is there. It's part of my make-up. That is the hardest thing to come to terms with, the fact that not everyone will like what you do, not everyone will rate you."

It's clear that the harsh criticism of his novels used to get him down, but he says that happens less now. He doesn't write the books for critics – he writes them for his readers.

"It's popular fiction," he says. "You can give yourself a kind of air of greater mystique and greater depth if you are more angst-ridden, if you write about more dysfunctional families and minority groups and all of that, which I could. It amuses me sometimes to think that I could use a pseudonym and write misery memoirs. But I suppose I'm not going to change tack now, I'll just crack on. I just want to write a good read."

The fact that he writes romantic fiction came as a shock to him, he says, but he thinks it makes sense in terms of the sensitivity to feelings he had, even as a boy.

"My writing is about feelings and relationships. It might be populist but nonetheless it's very real. The feelings I write about and the conundrums that my characters face with their love lives are real."

He reckons there's a tendency to devalue what he calls "easy reads" – but then he qualifies what he means: "I work hard at making them easy reads, so that they flow, but that doesn't make them mindless."

You don't have to be a genius to spot a theme here: the boy who couldn't find his niche, the man who still struggles to win the admiration that he feels he deserves, who feels that the greatest challenge is to "feel comfortable with something".

Titchmarsh is without doubt a contradiction – a man who loves to perform (he met his wife at an operatic society), loves an audience, but who also likes to spend his time alone, gardening or writing. Despite having achieved enormous success, he still feels like a fraud, as if he might be found out.

"I do feel like that," he says. "It's good for you to feel that. You can't account for fashion."

And with that, I reckon he's nailed it. Alan Titchmarsh is undoubtedly popular and certainly successful but I suspect he will never be fashionable. But then, he never has been.

"I used to buy classical records when I was 12 and 13," he recalls. "All the other kids in the street were buying the Beatles. I did get hold of She Loves You for my street cred but I would buy Borodin or Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountain and bring them back home in brown paper bags so nobody would see them. I've still got those records." sm

• Folly, by Alan Titchmarsh, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced 18.99.