And I thought that the way that the bar has been raised in lifestyle television, particularly by Jamie Oliver with the likes of Jamie's Kitchen and Jamie's School Dinners, led to Don biting off more than he could chew with his 2006 series, Growing Out of Trouble, in which he tried to help heroin abusers to overcome their addiction with the holistic power of horticulture.
And while I was as surprised as anybody at the news that he had suffered a stroke in 2008, and I wouldn’t try and blame that particular series in any way for contributing to it, I’m glad that he is now fronting something less taxing, like My Dream Farm. He looks much more comfortable in his own skin - or, rather, in his trademark faded, baggy corduroys trousers and braces.
This is a troubleshooting reality series firmly in the mould of The Hotel Inspector, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Country House Rescue et al., although its closest cousin is probably Grand Designs. Indeed, if you look away and just listen to Don’s voice, it could be Kevin McCloud you’re hearing. The series follows people who, undeterred by the number of supermarket-ransomed farmers heading for the exit, have decided that their future lies in agriculture. There’s one born every minute, you might think, which is great for the makers of My Dream Farm.
The programme began with the statistic that 80 per cent of Britain is farmland, but less than two per cent of the population has anything to do with farming - figures which seem less astonishing when you consider how much of that farmland must be owned by the royal family. Anyway, looking to bolster the two per cent were Dick and Pauline, newly arrived with their two children on Dartmoor from Dick’s native Holland.
Dick was a corporate high-flyer in the Netherlands until he was diagnosed with arthritis, and, deciding that a less sedentary lifestyle was required to ease his inflamed joints, he took up... hill farming. It was hard to see which, the bipeds or the quadrupeds, were the lambs to the slaughter, but television loves such insane challenges, so you could see why this particular episode opened the series.
Dick and Pauline’s 34 acres of Dartmoor were undeniably picturesque – stunning even. But as Don observed, there was not enough of it. “However pretty it is, you can’t live off 30 acres of livestock," he said, wearing his practical hat. And then, breathing in the magnificent panorama, his poetic side took over. "But what a fabulous place to risk everything on.”
Profitable small farms in Britain are all about diversifying, and Dick and Pauline had plenty of ideas, from candle-making and rare breed pigs to stuffing duvets with wool (for people who don’t like the idea that geese have been sacrificed for their good night’s sleep). Don seized on this last idea, and, such is the power of television, managed to persuade buyers from John Lewis and the Malmaison to come all the way down to Devon - the styling of their Wellington boots suggesting that the only farm they had ever visited before this was Chalk Farm.
Another trope of this reality TV format is the inspirational outing, in which our trainee farmers learn from successful enterprises, and Dick and Pauline were duly dispatched to a wool mill that was going to prepare the stuffing for their duvets, and a sheep farmer who has added value to every inch of his own ruminants – a bestseller being a woolly pillow for dogs.
In fact My Dream Farm didn’t miss a trick of the genre, including the Kevin McCloud-like sermon at the end. Format and subject were well suited, nevertheless, and in Monty Don they’ve found an ideal presenter. I just still somehow think I would prefer reading his book of the series.
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