A SMALL corner of Britain will forever be in bloom while a perennial listeners' favourite remains on the airwaves.

BBC Radio 4's Gardener's Question Time is still going strong in its 56th year and is believed to be one of the longest-running shows in broadcasting history.

Despite a few tweaks, the tried and trusted format remains largely untouched, regardless of venue or composition of the expert panel.

It remains as, or even more popular than ever, with around two million listeners in recent years, riding partly on the back of television's garden makeover boom.

The Gardeners' Question Time roadshow, a regular visitor to the North-East over the years, arrived back in the region for two shows.

Durham County Cricket Club's Riverside ground at Chester-le-Street provided the venue for the programmes which will be broadcast this Sunday and a Sunday in August.

An audience of 300 eager gardeners packed into the members' lounge for the 40-minute recordings, to be squeezed into half-hour slots when they go out on the air.

Some of the panel had visited three local gardens to answer listeners' questions in situ.

But the rest of the questions were selected at a half-hour pre-show meeting from those submitted on arrival by the audience.

Producer Trevor Taylor and panel chairman, familiar North-East broadcaster Eric Robson, both veterans of more than 500 programmes, picked the prickly posers to test the knowledge of the expert panel.

The programme has a permanent pool of seven experts, but only three appear on each edition to prevent any risk of it becoming stale. For the Chester-le-Street recordings the trio were John Cushnie, Bob Flowerdew and Roy Lancaster.

Mr Taylor said the one major 'seed change' in his stint in charge came with the decision to pose the questions unseen.

"Previously, the panel was given the questions beforehand to help them come up with their answers in advance, but we decided to add an extra touch of spontaneity by putting them to the panel for the first time before the programme.

"Otherwise there are only small changes here and there which wouldn't be evident from week to week. If anyone was to suggest tinkering with it the BBC would be picketed and I would be lynched, but that's not going to happen.

"I was listening to some of the old 1940s recordings and the questions don't change a great deal, except some of the chemical controls then suggested have long since been banned."

Mr Taylor said the show had benefited from the increased interest created by television gardening programmes.

* The Chester-le-Street recordings, complete with a tricky legal poser for the panel from a Gilling West gardener, can be heard on Sunday, July 13, and Sunday, August 17, both at 2pm, repeated in each case the following Wednesday, at 3pm.