The Glamorous World of... Monty Don

The first in what I hope will be a series of throroughly uninspiring facts on a string of unsuspecting journos and media figures. Remember kids, you saw it here first!

We start this week with Monty Don who, according to a long-suffering BBC underling (whose sister works at my office), regularly runs his staff into the ground for his programme Gardeners' World. While Monty's busy hawking the lens, his minions are rushing out to Somerset to buy exotic (and often heavy) plants, which they then have to transport all the way back up to Stratford, where the TV garden is actually based. Not so surprising perhaps, but then wouldn't you expect a flagship programme like Gardeners' World and a big organisation like the BBC to be able to arrange for things to be delivered?

It also turns out that Monty's flair for exotic flora has translated into an equally adventurous taste in food... not. When it comes to lunch, our mole says that without fail, Mr. Don always orders either a greasy cheese and tomato sandwich or a whopping great jacket potato filled with chilli. Nice. No sign of those organically grown radishes or what have you that he keeps foisting on the rest of us, then...