Michele Hewitson: Blame it on the weather

Only a very sad person would admit to sitting through almost all of a marathon session of The Good Life. We're blaming it on the weather. And saying it is the telly equivalent of one of those cures designed to make you give up, say, the fags, by making you smoke six packs in a row until you throw up and swear never to smoke again.

We've always been fans of The Good Life. Well, it was pretty funny. For its day. In a gentle sort of way. And nobody in the history of the sitcom has had more hideous costumes than the arch snob Margot. But after hours of watching stories about pig births and spud-digging and jokes about self-sufficiency in Surbiton and God knows how many jokes about the dreaded pea shoot wine, I think we can pronounce ourselves cured.

That's it, we said. No more watching would-be hippies ponce about making bad puns and worse jokes about pigs.

But you know what happens to addicts: they often find themselves slipping back into bad habits. So for some reason I found myself watching Escape to River Cottage on Saturday night. This is a repeat, but what's wrong with repeats? We had, after all, recently sat through, oh all right, eight hours of repeats of The Good Life, most of which we had already sat through a number of times before.

Escape to River Cottage is about a double-barelled bloke called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who "follows his dream to escape the city and live as a small land-holder in rural Dorset". This seems a bit excessive: all he had to do was move to Surbiton. But there he is in Dorset looking like a hippy in a way that the Good Lifers never did. Funny thing about the Good Lifers, they couldn't afford to buy soap but they always had that freshly scrubbed look about them.

Hugh looks a bit like he's been dying to get away from the city so he doesn't have to wash as often. Hugh is not a sentimental chap. He rips out the foxgloves and the rest of a lovely cottage garden to make room for his broad beans. He's not a vegetarian so he has to get in what he calls, in a manly, small-holderish sort of way, "meat futures". These are pigs. Pigs stick their snouts in his pocket when he goes to meet some with a view to buying some bacon on legs. "That's their way of saying they're not sure about you," said the pig purveyor, Peggy. In country lingo this means that Peggy wasn't sure of him.

For all the talk on The Good Life about not being sentimental about meat stocks, we never saw anything as actually self-sufficient as porkers being turned into bacon. On The Good Life all food was miraculously turned into polystyrene blobs which bore absolutely no resemblance to food. On River Cottage we see Hugh shooting pigeons, which he then turns into some fancy pie and feeds to his slightly startled and very stiff-upper-lippy neighbours. Shades of The Good Life there.

This packing up or changing lifestyles and chasing dreams has ever been a favourite telly pursuit. And over on TV One on Sunday nights is A Place in France in which two British blokes, Nigel and Nippy, foray into the countryside in the south of France in pursuit of the perfect holiday cottage. A Place in France moves at the pace of an escargot; it makes The Good Life look positively racy in pace. All they seem to do is bicker, mildly, as they tootle about said French countryside looking at slums which the French must reserve for sale to gullible foreigners.

Last week they were bickering about what sized cottage they needed. Nigel, a world-class whinger, maintained they didn't need a great big place. So he'd found a tiny one. "I can't even tie my turban here," said Nippy, a Sikh. "How much space do you need to tie your turban?" said Nigel. "Six metres," said Nippy.

Ha ha. Daft enough to have made it past the joke writers on The Good Life. I can see us settling in on Sundays for this gentle jog of television watching.