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Alan Titchmarsh’s jeans blurred by North Korean TV censors (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 8 months ago by Emperor to c/andfinally

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His calm demeanour and wholesome vocation have apparently endeared him to one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. But there is something about Alan Titchmarsh that North Korea’s censors can’t quite forgive – his jeans.

The green-fingered broadcaster and author of raunchy novels has been a fixture on state television since 2022, albeit with the addition of a blurred effect from the waist down.

By wearing jeans to potter about in Britain’s gardens in his BBC TV series Garden Secrets, Titchmarsh, 74, fell foul of a North Korean ban on the garments, which the regime has forbidden since the early 1990s because they are seen as a symbol of US imperialism.

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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 2 points 8 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The green-fingered broadcaster and author of raunchy novels has been a fixture on state television since 2022, albeit with the addition of a blurred effect from the waist down.

In an episode aired on Monday and set in the gardens of the 17th-century Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, Titchmarsh can be seen kneeling in soil, the sleeves of his checked shirt rolled up, plant pots and pruning shears at the ready.

“I never imagined that my programmes would reach North Korea, but hopefully the calming nature of British gardening will be well received there,” he said at the time.

The censoring of Titchmarsh’s wardrobe is part of a campaign to shield North Koreans from the “malign” influence of western culture that began under the former leader, Kim Jong-il.

While his son, the leader Kim Jong-un, has permitted 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, the 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 words, as well as dyed or long hair, it said.

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