Costa's Garden Odyssey on SBS

Costa's Garden Odyssey
SBS One, 8pm

IN THE sea of vanilla that is television hosting — I am thinking of you, Karl Stefanovic — there are a very few exotic blooms. But gardening shows do sometimes produce them. Pre-eminent among them was former ABC gardening guru Peter Cundall.

His enthusiasm, seniority (he was on TV until he turned 80) and gaudy shirts were something to cherish among the square jaws, blow dries and faux sincerity of the medium at its mainstream. Since his departure, there has been a void.

Might the eponymous Costa, a colourful Bondi bloke of Greek heritage and a similar passion for cultivation, fill it? He's a fighting chance of becoming a cult figure based on this episode of his racy new SBS gardening series. He can certainly riff about all aspects of gardening but even better, he sports the most wild and woolly beard to grace a small screen outside a midday movie set in the middle ages.

Or at least a ZZ Top reunion concert. There's plenty of evocative social history thrown into the program. Tonight he visits a government housing estate where residents from different backgrounds are working their own plots in a community garden.

In a lovely vignette, he discovers two elderly gents — a Vietnamese refugee and a Lebanese migrant — who share a friendship and a mutual passion for gardening but can't communicate with each other as neither speaks each other's language. Although they do speak Costa's universal language of gardening.