It was shaping up to be your ordinary common or garden gardening show. Presented by the affable Alan Titchmarsh, Ground Force promised to be a garden makeover programme that wouldn’t exactly break new ground. But soon into the first series in 1997, viewers began to take notice of the buxom, red-headed girl in wellies and T-shirt who seemed to spend much of the series up to her elbows in compost.
Charlie Dimmock never bothered to dress up or wear make-up in front of millions of TV viewers. In fact, she never even bothered to wear a bra. Soon, even viewers with no interest in gardening were tuning in to check out Charlie’s begonias, and Dimmock found herself an unlikely sex symbol.
Dimmock said she didn’t like wearing a bra because it was too uncomfortable for working in the garden. Either way, her bust boosted ratings: Ground Force gained 12 million viewers and Dimmock gained a fervent following of green-fingered fans. It launched her career as one of the UK’s best-known gardening experts. She went on to publish several books about gardening, and present her own TV series, The Joy of Gardening and Charlie’s Garden Army.
Despite her refusal to dress up for the telly (she says she hates buying clothes) she was persuaded to appear in her own calendar in 2000, which outsold lingerie model Caprice’s calendar of the same year. It was official – gardening was glamorous.
Dimmock was born in Romsey, Hampshire in 1966, and had a happy childhood playing in the woods near her family’s cottage, and helping her grandad in the vegetable patch. After graduating from horticultural college, she got a job at her local garden centre. While she was working there, a producer asked her to come on a programme called Grass Roots and demonstrate how to make a pond. Five years later, the same producer was looking for experts for a new BBC garden makeover series, and he remembered the green-fingered redhead who knew a lot about water features. Soon, Dimmock was part of the Ground Force team, and grandads were getting Charlie Dimmock calendars in their Christmas stockings. The show may have done wonders for her profile, but it also led to her break-up with her long-term partner, after she had a fling with one of the film crew.
In 2004, Dimmock’s mother and stepfather were killed in the Asian tsunami. The tragedy came as Dimmock was struggling to keep her career going following the axing of Ground Force. Although she was a household name, gardening was her area of expertise, which left her with few options – nobody seemed interested in producing a TV series about water features. She did some TV coverage for the Chelsea Flower Show, appeared in an ad for a mattress company, and got a part in a production of Calendar Girls. Most recently, she has been on ITV’s daybreak, imparting her gardening wisdom, and she made a DVD about bee-keeping. This Christmas, Charlie appears in a gardening show of sorts – a panto production of Jack The Beanstalk, in which she plays the Organic Fairy.
