A needle in a haystack
PASSION in the pig pens. Coupling in the cow sheds. Topless in’t top field. I could have come up with dozens of better titles for a farmers’ dating show than LOVE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE (BBC2). Still, it tells you what you’re going to get.
Farmer’s daughter Sara Cox plays a sort of Cilla Black in gum boots, matchmaking rural singles with people who think country living is just a magazine.
Having each chosen harems of three hopefuls last week, single farmers Pete and Ed brought them back to their respective estates for a weekend more testing than any sheepdog trial. On either side of the Pennines, action veered between the comic and the painful. Ed, 25, sensed a connection with Megan, who’d plainly mustered up a lot of courage to try dating again after the death of her husband.
Unfortunately, Ed’s head was turned by the mystique of Rebecca, whose mystique seemed largely based on not saying anything and flicking her hair.
Over in Yorkshire, Pete was similarly fascinated by the loudest of the contenders, Francesca. Heavily made-up with no interest in farming, Francesca gamely took Pete’s challenge to help with the 5am milking and also took a nasty kick from one of the cows.
You sensed, knowing the format of the show, that the older, wiser, other two, Caroline and Helen, were just waiting for someone to step in a cowpat and someone duly did.
On a night out at the local, Francesca discovered that being a farmer’s wife meant helping the farmer on the farm and Pete discovered that she didn’t believe in doing that. Passably watchable, this programme could be better if it trimmed down a bit.
To fill an hour, a bewildering slurry of first meets and first dates is spread on thick, to the point where you can’t always tell one lovelorn farmer from another. It’s also obvious that no working farmer has the time to make romantic decisions between possible mates over the course of a weekend. Shoving everyone together in a farmhouse therefore, so that some can prove their worth and some can be eliminated, is actually unkind.
Far more humane is FIRST DATES (C4) where they meet, flirt and decide whether they want to take it further, all in between the cocktails and the pudding.
It’s not a format that tries to make people uncomfortable, or any more uncomfortable than anyone could be on a televised first date.
At the same time though it doesn’t go for sugar coating. Things often don’t work out, the hope that fizzed over the cocktails looks like cold gravy when the bill arrives.
There was an obvious lift of mood, though, when Ketan told Brodie about his autism and she shared her diagnosis with him.
For this clever, funny, awkward young man, it seemed like a breakthrough, a defining moment where he realised that not every person would turn their back on him when he mentioned the “A word”.
He proceeded to wow Brodie by paying the bill without using his credit card because he’d memorised the numbers on it. That didn’t mean love was in the air though. She said she didn’t feel a connection.
He said he couldn’t imagine anyone her age not knowing any good jokes and they parted amicably. That’s the other fine thing about this show of course. The fireworks don’t have to go off for something wonderful to happen.