Hugh's Fish Fight: Fearnley-Whittingstall fails to impress

I don’t like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I can’t decide if it’s his patronising upper middle class tone or the fact he reminds me of Piggy from Lord of the Flies - either way my dislike was only heightened by the launch of his Fish Fight campaign in 2010 and the subsequent instalments that highlighted different fishery issues.

For me, his approach to these incredibly complex problems was too black and white. Fishermen were barbarians who used highly destructive methods to catch fish and retailers were dirty rotten scoundrels guilty of pulling the wool over the eyes of consumers by wilfully mislabelling products.

So it was with a large sigh, a heavy heart and a bottomless glass of Scotch that I sat down to watch what promises to be the final instalment in the Fish Fight series, Hugh’s Last Stand (C4, 7pm, 2 March).

Watching it brought to mind the Michael Caine quote about his role in Jaws: The Revenge: “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

Unfortunately I have seen Hugh’s Last Stand, and it reminded me of an ocean stick. The programme simply reconstituted previous Fish Fight episodes and updated viewers on progress. Some achievements were impressive - the changes to European law surrounding discards - others not so - penguins and seals in the Antarctic can now eat krill all year round (yay!) The one thing the programme failed to change was my dislike of its protagonist. Still, at least it’s the last Fish Fight.