This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, but I almost never watch television. I’d like to tell you that instead I read books voraciously but in truth, most of my time is taken up with honest pursuits like skinning deer, training my spaniel and removing old tree guards.
I am so out of the loop on all things TV that I was amazed to hear from my wife that you don’t actually just have to watch “what’s on” anymore. You can scroll through a list of thousands of programmes to find almost anything that’s ever “been on”. I am, Constance suggests, just about neck and neck with her 87-year-old grandmother in terms of domestic technical prowess.
As I thought about this, the gravity of it hit me. Being able to watch everything ever means being able to watch Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown; it means being able to watch that 1996 classic, Two Fat Ladies; and it means being able to return again to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage.
River Cottage, was an earthy and whimsical account of a chef escaping to Dorset from London in search of the good life. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall kept pigs, he shot rabbits, and he caught mackerel. But as well as looking for the good life he was looking too for local traditions. He ate nettles in pubs, he met gamekeepers, and he joined a pack of bloodhounds.
After discovering “TV on demand”, I spent a couple of weeks living differently. I started putting my pyjamas on early every night and I binged River Cottage by the fire, recalling watching those very same episodes when I was eight or nine years old. I remembered, with a strange sense of déjà vu, being inspired to do things then that I do lots of now: making rabbit pie, foraging for water mint and shooting deer.
A fortnight later, I spent a hectic Sunday in Norfolk building “duck nesting tubes”. The concept is simple but ingenious. Mallard ducks nest on the ground and very often, before the ducklings hatch, the likes of foxes and magpies raid the nests and make off with the eggs. The nesting tubes, which are a bit like a Swiss roll fashioned from wire and straw, but with a hollow middle, give the ducks a safe, elevated place to nest.
It’s estimated that when ducks nest on the ground, there is about a 15 per cent chance that eggs make it through to hatching, whereas when they use a nesting tube, that figure rises to around 70 per cent.
As I stood there in my thigh waders, in the pond up behind my house, knocking a fence post into the mud to attach the duck nesting tube to, I thought about River Cottage and how much the world has changed. Back then, at the turn of the new millennium, rabbit hunting, fishing and heading out with a pack of hounds was prime time TV. Nowadays, I suspect a Channel 4 commissioner (Channel 4 being where River Cottage was first aired) would baulk at much of the content.
But more than that, there is the sense throughout that Dorset is a world apart. Not that it was unique in that. Just two and a half decades ago, counties felt much more distinct. The West Country was hunting country, Northumberland was still a place that had harbours full of fishing boats, and in Norfolk salty old men talked about goose-shooting in salty pubs.
In part, we have legislated the distinct culture of counties out of existence. First there was the ban on hunting, and now Labour has even set its sights on the shooting of certain types of duck, too, but there are other forces that have come for our counties. Second home ownership has played a part, as well as businesses like pubs and fishing tackle shops being forced to close for a multitude of economic reasons.
I don’t suppose Fearnley-Whittingstall would have recognised it at the time, but part of the power of the River Cottage series is that he was showcasing a world that was fast disappearing.
In one memorable scene he cooks sheep’s testicles with a vet who tells him that getting to keep the testicles was always a perk of being called out to a farm to castrate a lamb. Fearnley-Whittingstall cooks them with sage and serves them on toast. They both agree that they are really quite delicious. It was not so long ago, but England was very different then.
