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GARDENERS WORLD As usual I watched Gardener's World on television last night, presented by Monty Don, Chris Beardshaw and Rachel de Thame. I must confess that I haven't a great deal of interest in gardening; however I do have a great deal of interest in Rachel de Thame. This comely lass is to gardening programmes what Nigella Lawson is to cookery programmes, and in much the same way that I can watch Nigella cooking for half-an-hour without having a clue at the end of it as to what she has been cooking I can watch Rachel de Thame gardening and for all I can remember of it she might have been painting the kitchen ceiling or giving the dog a bath.     This week Rachel said she had 'definitely got the urge to plant a hanging basket'. Well she certainly gave me the urge to plant something, but it wasn't a hanging basket. Unfortunately, unlike Nigella, Rachel doesn't get the whole show to herself, and if you want to enjoy her charms you also have to put up with Monty Don and Chris Beardshaw sowing seedlings and making compost heaps and whatever else it is they do to take up valuable Rachel-lusting-after time. I have little time for either of them. I mean Monty Don, what sort of name is that for a gardener? He sounds more like an out-of-work bullfighter, or the leader of a Latin America dance band, Monty Don and his Seville Serenaders; and if Chris Beardshaw isn't the perfect name for an all-purpose social worker married to someone called Roz then I don't know what is.      At one time Gardeners World used to be presented by people with proper, solid, dependable, gardening-type names like Percy Thrower or Geoff Hamilton. I suppose the rot set in with Alan Titchmarsh, a man whose surname sounds like a back-to-front bird, or possibly the photograph for the third month of a topless calendar.     It wouldn't be so bad if Monty Don and Chris Beardshaw were worth listening to, but invariably their gardening advice is about as much use as another Millenium Dome. For example the other week Monty Don did a piece about repairing your lawn and generally bringing it up to speed in time for summer. (Why? You'll only have to mow it.) When he was showing us how to get rid of troublesome weeds, and in particular dandelions, he offered this advice: "Take a good strong trowel, drive it down as far as it will go all round the dandelion, then pull out the dandelion, root and all. It will leave quite a large hole, so simply fill the hole with top soil, pat it down, sprinkle a few grass seeds on top, water them in, and in a few weeks time you'll have healthy new grass where the dandelion used to be." Really? Is that really how to get rid of a dandelion on your lawn? Honestly? Because left to my own devices I would have tunnelled under the lawn and dragged the dandelion down from the inside. Having done that I might possibly have guessed that it might not be a bad idea to fill in the resultant hole with topsoil but there is no way I would have had the intelligence to mix a few grass seeds in with it. For Christ's sake, how did he think we were going to deal with a dandelion in the lawn, use a stick of dynamite then shit in the hole?     That's the trouble with gardening programmes, they either take dumbing down to an even lower level than Delia Smith did when she taught us how to boil water, or insist on calling plants by their Latin names so that you don't know whether they're talking about buttercups, Venus fly traps or sexual perversions in ancient Rome.     I rest my case. And my trowel.