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The British program "Garden Secrets" with Alan was shown on North Korean television Titchmarsh from the BBC. Everything would have been fine, but the presenter's jeans were censored by the North Korean authorities, so they had to be obscured. The fact is that this element of the wardrobe is considered a "symbol of US imperialism" in a country with one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world, so any demonstration of it is prohibited there.
The episode aired on North Korean television on Monday, and a clip of it with the pants spotted went viral. This is reported by NK News.
According to the source, by wearing jeans to play in British gardens for his BBC series "Garden Secrets", Titchmarsh, 74, violated a North Korean ban on these clothes, which the regime banned back in the early 1990s as a "symbol of American imperialism".
In the episode, Titchmarsh is knee-deep in the ground, his plaid shirt sleeves rolled up, plant pots and secateurs at the ready. The presenter's jeans are blurred. The funniest thing is that manipulations with the editing hardly helped to hide from the audience that the presenter was wearing precisely the "forbidden" denim pants.
The censorship of Titchmarsh's wardrobe is said to be part of a campaign to protect North Koreans from the "pernicious" influence of Western culture, which began under former leader Kim Jong Il.
Although his son, the odious dictator Kim Jong-un, has allowed his entourage to use Ford Transit minibuses and is himself an NBA fan, he warns against "bourgeois culture" and "anti-socialist behavior" being undermined the socialist project of North Korea.
In 2022, Radio Free Asia, which is funded by the US government, reported that the regime had cracked down on "capitalist" fashion and hairstyles, targeting skinny jeans and T-shirts with foreign words, as well as dyed or long hair.
