Alan Titchmarsh's Jeans Blurred By North Korean TV Censors

His calm demeanour and wholesome profession endeared him to one of the world's most authoritarian regimes. But there's something about Alan Titchmarsh that North Korean censors can't quite forgive - his jeans.

The green-fingered broadcaster and author of Ranji novels has been a fixture on state television since 2022, though adding a murky influence from the waist down.

By wearing potters' jeans in a British garden in her BBC TV series Garden Secrets, Titchmarsh, 74, ran afoul of North Korea's ban on the clothes, which the government has banned since the early 1990s because they are seen as symbols of the United States. imperialism

In an episode aired on Monday and set in the garden of 17th-century Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, Titchmarsh is seen kneeling on the ground, his checked shirt sleeves rolled up, plant pot and pruning shears ready.

Her jeans are, however, faded, though not enough to hide the fact that she is wearing denim.

North Korean censors edited 15 minutes into each hour-long episode of the series, which first aired in the UK in 2010, and masked Titchmarsh's commentary with North Korean narrators, as well as adding a soundtrack of instrumental music, according to the NK News website, but the presenter's dulcet Yorkshire tones in the background. can be made

Screenshot from the North Korean TV version of Garden Secrets by Alan Titchmarsh

Teachmarsh's unlikely celebrity in North Korea has been noticed in 2022, but media coverage hasn't focused on his fuzzy jeans. "I never imagined my programs would reach North Korea, but hopefully the laid-back nature of British gardening will be well received there," he said at the time.

The censoring of Teachmarsh's clothing is part of a campaign to protect North Koreans from the "evil" influence of Western culture that began under former leader Kim Jong-il.

Although 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 behaviour" to undermine North Korea's socialist project.

In 2022, US government-funded Radio Free Asia said the regime was cracking down on "capitalist" fashion and hairstyles, targeting skinny jeans and T-shirts bearing foreign sounds, as well as dyed or long hair.

An unnamed female North Korean source told the broadcaster, “Mainly women in their 20s and 30s have been targeted. If they are caught, they are made to wait on the side of the road until patrols can finish their crackdown on the area.

“After that, they will be taken to the district Youth League office, where they will have to write letters confessing their crime. Then they must contact someone at home to bring them acceptable clothing and then they are released.”

The ban on jeans does not seem to extend to Western tourists, who are allowed to dress as they please when they go north.

It is unclear how, or if, the regime acquired the rights to Garden Secrets. North Korea regularly broadcasts "politically neutral" material from abroad, including sports and science and technology programs, NK News said, possibly because the Garden series was pirated around international sanctions imposed in response to North Korea's nuclear development.