His calm demeanor and healthy career clearly endeared him to one of the world’s most repressive regimes. But there’s one thing about Alan Titchmarsh that North Korean censors can’t forgive – his jeans.
The gardening broadcaster and author of raunchy novels has been a regular fixture on national television since 2022, albeit more obscurely from the waist down.
Titchmarsh, 74, broke North Korea’s ban on jeans when she wandered around an English garden wearing jeans in BBC drama Secrets of the Garden. The regime has banned jeans since the early 1990s because they were seen as a symbol of American imperialism.
In Monday’s episode, which takes place in the garden of the 17th-century Hatfield Estate in Hertfordshire, Titchmarsh can be seen kneeling in the dirt, rolling up the sleeves of his plaid shirt and preparing flower pots and pruning shears.
However, his jeans were blurry, but not enough to hide the fact that he was wearing jeans.
When the show first aired in the UK in 2010, North Korean censors cut each hour-long episode to 15 minutes, masked Titchmarsh’s comments with North Korean narration and added an instrumental soundtrack, North Korea News reported . website. However, only the presenter’s dulcet Yorkshire tones could be heard in the background.
Titchmarsh’s unexpected fame in North Korea attracted attention in 2022, but media coverage didn’t focus on his fuzzy jeans. “I never thought my project would reach North Korea, but hopefully the calming nature of British gardening will be welcomed by North Korea,” he said at the time.
The scrutiny of Titchmarsh clothing is part of a campaign under former leader Kim Jong Il to protect North Koreans from the “malign” influence of Western culture.
While his son, leader Kim Jong Un, allows his entourage to use Ford Transit vans and is a fan of NBA basketball, he has warned against allowing “bourgeois culture” and “anti-socialist behavior” to undermine North Korea’s socialist plans.
In 2022, the US government-funded Radio Free Asia said the regime was cracking down on “capitalist” fashion and hairstyles, targeting tight jeans and T-shirts with foreign writing, as well as dyed or long hair.
An unnamed female source in North Korea told the broadcaster that the crackdown “mainly targets women in their 20s and 30s. If they are caught, they are asked to wait on the roadside until patrols Complete the suppression of the area.
“Only then are they taken to the regimental office in the district, where they have to write a letter confessing their crime. Then they have to contact someone at home to bring them acceptable clothing, and then they are released.”
The ban on jeans does not appear to apply to Western tourists, who can wear whatever they want when visiting North Korea.
It’s unclear how or if the regime acquired the rights to “Secret of the Garden.” North Korea regularly broadcasts “politically neutral” material from abroad, including sports and technology programs, North Korea News said, adding that the gardening series was likely pirated to circumvent international sanctions imposed over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. arms.
