“If you are going to work in the garden, wear old jeans,” my mother advised me as a growing child. Innocent and young as I was, I had no idea that I was making an “imperialist” statement, but last Monday the scales fell from my eyes. Then the North Korean state broadcaster KCTV decided to broadcast a British gardening program Garden Secrets to censor the presenter's blue jeans.
The whole jeans thing
It's not about blurring a brand name, Alan Titchmarsh's entire pair of jeans has to be rejected by the North Korean censor. The man's colored checkered shirt has been left untouched and apparently met with the approval of the strict North Korean state socialism.
Then in the early 1990s in Russia and Eastern Europe wind of change the wind started to blow, then North Korean leader Kim Jong-il issued an oukaze against the jeans. He saw the garment as “a symbol of American imperialism.”
That is under his millennial-son Kim Jong-un has not changed.
On the contrary: in recent years, extra tough action has been taken against North Koreans who listen to and watch smuggled foreign pop music or TV series.
'Therapeutic effect'
North Korea broadcasts Western programs more often, as long as they are apolitical in tone. Titchmarsh can laugh about being a 'hit' in North Korea.
Opposite the DailyMail he said he hopes the soothing and therapeutic effect of gardening will have a positive impact on KCTV viewers.
The shortened and dubbed episode of Garden Secrets is set in the famous garden of the seventeenth-century English country house Hatfield House – former property of English monarchs. King Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth I spent their childhood there.
That seems at odds with Pyongyang's communist ideals – until you realize that Kim Jong-un is actually the third absolute monarch in a dynasty with hereditary succession.
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