UITabBarController moreNavigationController table cell background images

Question

Wow, was that ever a mouthful. :)

We've already seen a good thread on customizing the more menu (table view) in a tab bar.

For our next trick … how might one add a background image to the table cells?

I thought I could get away with overriding tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: in my More Table View's Data Source class (see earlier link for the methodology). Alas, it only changes the background under the image and accessory views to the left and right of each cell.

-(UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {

    // Let the original Data Source get a hold of the cell first.
    UITableViewCell *cell = [originalDataSource tableView:tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath];

    // If we override the textColor, that works fine. (Commented out for now.)
    //cell.textLabel.textColor = [UIColor whiteColor];

    // If we override the background view … that doesn't work so well.
    cell.backgroundView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"cellBackground.png"]];

    return cell;
}

I know, imageNamed: is evil, and perhaps I should create one background image and just reuse it throughout (vs. allocating multiple UIImageView objects). Apart from those items, any thoughts? (I tried adjusting the textLabel's backgroundColor too, to no avail … unless I'm doing something wrong there.)