How better to escape the rat race than by joining a fiercely competitive TV game show?
"Our urge to connect with the soil has never been stronger." So began A Farmer's Life For Me (BBC2, Tuesday 8pm), which put city types of debatable slickness in a contest to run a "dream farm" for a year.
A bit like Maximus in Gladiator, they longed to swap spreadsheets for fields of swirling gold, to feel the warm kiss of manure beneath their manicured nails.
Picked for their "potential and determination", and a proven history of growing cress in a window box, we met the usual TV tropes: the Good-Looking But Irritating Ones; the Ones With Their Own Wellies; the Burly Lesbians.
Winnowing the merely inept from the truly abject was Jimmy Doherty, who's on TV even more these days than rioting Egyptians. Wearing a different Hoxton-check shirt every time he was on camera undermined his salt-of-the-earthiness, true, but Jimmy did share some wisdom, counselling shocked contestants that "cows are larger than sheep".
Part one was a three-day bid to cultivate half an acre per team. One couple wondered out loud: "What would Jimmy do?", thus elevating the host to messianic status.
The joy of watching others fail never gets old, especially when smug stockbrokers nearly run over their spouses in tractors. And for non-farming viewers, it was hard to know if this was really much more than an oversized school project.
But it was genuinely fascinating to see the mini-farms take shape. Office-bound desk-jockeys will have felt pangs of envy at seeing the life they could have led. For the aspirant farmers were exactly that: animal lovers, hikers and picnickers, not seasoned sons of the soil who'd bite the head off a fox at the first whiff of TB. As most contestants chose their livestock on the basis of which were cutest, there'll surely be tears as the series goes on.
Certainly, darker times await, like dignity-stripping dressings down from supermarket buyers. And the team of sisters boasted the kind of rapport that tends to get resolved on farms with a shotgun.
It's probably a safe bet to say the warring siblings won't win the farm. But then, there's time enough for the earth in the grave.
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"Our urge to connect with the soil has never been stronger." So began A Farmer's Life For Me (BBC2, Tuesday 8pm), which put city types of debatable slickness in a contest to run a "dream farm" for a year.
A bit like Maximus in Gladiator, they longed to swap spreadsheets for fields of swirling gold, to feel the warm kiss of manure beneath their manicured nails.
Picked for their "potential and determination", and a proven history of growing cress in a window box, we met the usual TV tropes: the Good-Looking But Irritating Ones; the Ones With Their Own Wellies; the Burly Lesbians.
Winnowing the merely inept from the truly abject was Jimmy Doherty, who's on TV even more these days than rioting Egyptians. Wearing a different Hoxton-check shirt every time he was on camera undermined his salt-of-the-earthiness, true, but Jimmy did share some wisdom, counselling shocked contestants that "cows are larger than sheep".
Part one was a three-day bid to cultivate half an acre per team. One couple wondered out loud: "What would Jimmy do?", thus elevating the host to messianic status.
The joy of watching others fail never gets old, especially when smug stockbrokers nearly run over their spouses in tractors. And for non-farming viewers, it was hard to know if this was really much more than an oversized school project.
But it was genuinely fascinating to see the mini-farms take shape. Office-bound desk-jockeys will have felt pangs of envy at seeing the life they could have led. For the aspirant farmers were exactly that: animal lovers, hikers and picnickers, not seasoned sons of the soil who'd bite the head off a fox at the first whiff of TB. As most contestants chose their livestock on the basis of which were cutest, there'll surely be tears as the series goes on.
Certainly, darker times await, like dignity-stripping dressings down from supermarket buyers. And the team of sisters boasted the kind of rapport that tends to get resolved on farms with a shotgun.
It's probably a safe bet to say the warring siblings won't win the farm. But then, there's time enough for the earth in the grave.
More from this column
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