Britain's 'dullest man' produces bizarre calendar for 2024 - celebrating his favourite allotments
Kevin Beresford spent months travelling around his hometown of Redditch, Worcs., to find the best green spaces on offer for gardening fans.
The 71-year-old compiled his 12 favourites into a contender for the most boring calendar of 2024 – devoted entirely to public allotments.
The 71-year-old compiled his 12 favourites into a contender for the most boring calendar of 2024 – devoted entirely to public allotments.
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00:00 Hi, my name's Kevin Beresford and I'm the creator of Mundane Calendars
00:05 and this one in particular is the allotments of Redwich.
00:08 I like to take shots of English life that no one else would bother with
00:17 and I turn them into calendar formats.
00:20 I do roundabouts, prisons, allotments, all sorts of things.
00:26 I always feel that artists focus on the mundane.
00:30 You've got Tracey Hemings on Made Bed and Andy Warhol would do a can of soup,
00:34 things like that.
00:36 Even Van Gogh would just paint his chair with a pipe on it.
00:39 So I like to capture the mundane.
00:43 People have called me the dullest man in Britain.
00:45 I've got no objection to that.
00:47 It's a badge of honour for me to be named dull.
00:49 Dull is the new black.
00:51 It's sexy being dull.
00:52 [Pause]
01:10 Yeah, I did this calendar in just one day.
01:13 It took me one day.
01:14 Redwich isn't a big town so it was easy to get round to all these allotments.
01:18 The only problem I endured was the security is quite tight with allotments these days.
01:24 Because vegetables are so expensive now.
01:27 Tomatoes are the class A of veg, aren't they, at the moment.
01:31 So a lot of these allotments get broken into.
01:34 So I had to go up and ask permission to a lot of them
01:38 because they wanted to know what I'm taking photographs in an allotment for.
01:41 They thought I was casing the giant, so to speak.
01:45 So that was the only problem I had.
01:46 But I always thought allotment people were dull.
01:52 That's their hobby.
01:55 But I found out they're eco-warriors, really.
01:58 I mean, you get things like beehives now in allotments.
02:01 So that's their little bit of saving the planet if bees attract the flowers and they pollinate.
02:07 So these guys, to me, they're eco-warriors.
02:10 These diggers, digging for victory.
02:12 [BIRDS CHIRPING]
02:25 My calendars, they don't really sell in their thousands, perhaps hundreds.
02:30 And it all depends on people's mood.
02:32 And I don't know, the first time we did it was roundabouts of Redwich.
02:38 I just took photographs of traffic highways in Redwich.
02:42 And Graham Norton showed it on his show, the calendar.
02:46 And it went, you'd call it viral now.
02:49 We sold something like 20,000 copies.
02:51 I'm talking about 2003, this was.
02:54 So it's always tricky to predict which one's going to be the best seller.
03:00 At the moment, it's rubbish dumps of England that's selling well.
03:03 But I've got a good feeling about the allotments here.
03:06 Because you get a lot of people who are into this sort of thing, gardening,
03:10 growing vegetables.
03:11 And it's a good way of saving money, isn't it,
03:13 if you've got all these vegetables stacked up for the winter.
03:16 I have been voted the dullest man in Britain.
03:31 And I'm a member of the Dung Men's Club.
03:34 It started off in America by a guy called Leland Carson.
03:38 And he brought it over to England.
03:40 He lives in America and England.
03:42 So he decided to do the Dung Men's Club here.
03:44 And I'm the deputy assistant vice president of the Dung Men's Club.
03:50 He's the assistant vice president of the Dung Men's Club.
03:54 We can't hold an higher office than that, because it's too exciting.
03:58 So it's always got to be a vice president, never a president.
04:02 So yeah, I'm quite proud to be in the Dung Men's Club.
04:07 Oh, yeah.
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