KEY POINTS:
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a posh totty chef. He started off as the Eton and Oxford-educated eccentric who was nicknamed Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall for making roadkill into nosh and serving a human placenta flambe as pate.
In those days, I used to think he was sex on toast. But I am not so sure now - and it is not just because he has tamed his rustic hair and donned accountant glasses.
Hugh has officially become a megastar for his British campaign to get the great unwashed to grow and eat proper food. But strangely, he has become less hot. He has made four TV series chronicling his Good Life experiment at River Cottage in Dorset. With River Cottage Spring, which debuts tonight on Prime, he has a different project, getting five families of modern peasants to set up a smallholding in a vacant lot in urban Bristol where they will grow their own veges and raise pigs and chickens. The woolly-pully aim is to "reconnect with the seasons".
This is a new genre of reality TV - an upmarket, character-improving branch in the same vein as the BBC's excellent music-to-the-masses chronicle The Choir; tracksuit-wearing chavs are introduced to the finer things in life. But although it might be admirable it is also annoyingly preachy.
There is something deeply unsexy about self-righteousness. And does it really help poor people by making them feel guilty for eating two-minute noodles? Especially when it comes from a bossy Hooray Henry who gets to return to the Groucho Club after filming rather than plopping in front of the telly in a council flat.
The Times critic A.A. Gill was not a convert either. "The idea that ideal people should strive to live like 18th-century crofters is intellectual silage." He says growing your own vegetables is a bit like making your own fridge or whittling a car. Possible, but stupid.
I would add that it makes for watching-the-grass-grow television. Here is a sample as F-W and his token common people pick some asparagus: "You try that, it's absolutely gorgeous." "It's sweet right the way down." "Aw, it's fantastic isn't it?" Bring back the placenta flambe.
To liven things up, F-W resorts to some Nigella-ish food porn. "Look for firm smooth spears with nice tight buds - the first spears will be thrusting up in the next few weeks ... Ooh, it's a little bit sticky and very rooty."
Alongside the sweet asparagus, F-W is trying to convert a vegetarian back to meat by making her his butcher's apprentice. "If I had my way everybody who wants to eat meat would do a stint as a butcher's apprentice," schoolmarmish F-W harrumphs as he waves a lamb's entrails under her nose. In another scene pushy F-W races after a retching bogan with a sprig of rocket.
"Isn't it deliciously peppery?" It's enough to make you want to microwave some chicken nuggets.
* River Cottage Spring debuts tonight on Prime at 8.30pm.
