What's this? Huge Furry Wittering-balls talking sense? If only. Hugh's Fish Fight (9pm, C4, 11-13 January) started promisingly enough.
The first of three hour-long specials was, in stark contrast to last year's "only eat chickens that cost more than a tenner" campaign, an intelligent, coherently argued and genuinely moving call to arms over the horrifying amount of discard fish thrown back into the sea dead that result from the EU's Commons Fisheries Policy and fishing quotas.
You couldn't help but be affected by the sight of the fishermen hurling half their catch over the side or their evident anger and dismay at having to do so. And the absurdity of the situation isn't just that, as Hugh put it: "Cod is a fish we're being told to eat less of and are throwing away and coley is a fish we're being told to eat more of and are throwing away." It's also that a policy intended to preserve fish stocks could actually be doing the opposite though it's impossible to establish either way because the bycatch isn't landed, so levels can't be measured.
Hugh took to the beaches and fish and chip shops to highlight the issue and lobbied fisheries minister Richard Benyon to take the cause to Brussels. But for all the fury and indignation he whipped up, you have to wonder whether it'll come to anything, given that in part two he inexplicably abandoned the whole campaign to revert to type and indulge in a spot of Tesco-bashing.
The argument started to veer off course when he headed to the Maldives to find out about pole-and-line fishing and found time to dive with manta ray (a species thriving thanks to ethical fishing practices but also important to see up close, clearly). Then it leapt off a cliff, with a little help from two Greenpeace campaigners enlisted to dig the dirt on a cannery supplying Tesco.
Suddenly, Hugh's mission was reduced to getting Tesco to ditch or justify the claim on its tuna cans that it's "fully committed to fishing methods which protect the marine environment and its species". To be fair, it worked. Tesco now plans to source 100% pole-and-line tuna.
But ironically, the discard campaign was discarded. The question cynics will ask is whether it's because he thought it was unwinnable.
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The first of three hour-long specials was, in stark contrast to last year's "only eat chickens that cost more than a tenner" campaign, an intelligent, coherently argued and genuinely moving call to arms over the horrifying amount of discard fish thrown back into the sea dead that result from the EU's Commons Fisheries Policy and fishing quotas.
You couldn't help but be affected by the sight of the fishermen hurling half their catch over the side or their evident anger and dismay at having to do so. And the absurdity of the situation isn't just that, as Hugh put it: "Cod is a fish we're being told to eat less of and are throwing away and coley is a fish we're being told to eat more of and are throwing away." It's also that a policy intended to preserve fish stocks could actually be doing the opposite though it's impossible to establish either way because the bycatch isn't landed, so levels can't be measured.
Hugh took to the beaches and fish and chip shops to highlight the issue and lobbied fisheries minister Richard Benyon to take the cause to Brussels. But for all the fury and indignation he whipped up, you have to wonder whether it'll come to anything, given that in part two he inexplicably abandoned the whole campaign to revert to type and indulge in a spot of Tesco-bashing.
The argument started to veer off course when he headed to the Maldives to find out about pole-and-line fishing and found time to dive with manta ray (a species thriving thanks to ethical fishing practices but also important to see up close, clearly). Then it leapt off a cliff, with a little help from two Greenpeace campaigners enlisted to dig the dirt on a cannery supplying Tesco.
Suddenly, Hugh's mission was reduced to getting Tesco to ditch or justify the claim on its tuna cans that it's "fully committed to fishing methods which protect the marine environment and its species". To be fair, it worked. Tesco now plans to source 100% pole-and-line tuna.
But ironically, the discard campaign was discarded. The question cynics will ask is whether it's because he thought it was unwinnable.
More from this column
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