Show we’re flocking to watch

PROOF you don’t need to spend a fortune to make great television: Our Yorkshire Farm, Channel 5’s series about sheep farmers Amanda and Clive Owen and their nine ‘freerange’ children, has overtaken the BBC’s Line Of Duty in ratings, with one episode attracting 2.26 million viewers.

I can see why: the Owens’ humour and no-nonsense attitude to life makes for the kind of uplifting escapism we crave at the moment. Clive and Amanda are chalk and cheese — he’s 20 years older than her for a start. And yet they make the most brilliant team, she with her mini-skirts worn with gumboots, he slightly in awe of his glamorous wife (left).

It’s the perfect antidote to lockdown blues, not to mention the ultimate cure for townies with fantasies of moving from suburbia to the wilds of Yorkshire.

INCIDENTALLY, Amanda Owen’s love of farming came from reading James Herriot novels — which are returning to our screens also courtesy of Channel 5 in a remake of All Creatures Great And Small. The original starred Christopher Timothy as vet Herriot, up close and, shall we say, very personal with the business end of a cow. New legislation relating to the rights of animals in entertainment has put a stop to such behaviour, so the show has replaced the real thing with a prosthetic, ensuring dignity for actor and ruminant.

ARE we sure all this stuff about the BBC considering cutting Land Of Hope And Glory and Rule, Britannia! from the Last Night Of the Proms is not a real-time episode of writer John Morton’s hilarious BBC spoof, W1A? This Proms stunt is exactly the kind of thing ‘brand consultant’ Siobhan Sharpe (played by Jessica Hynes, pictured) would have dreamed up. In fact, it reminds me of that time she came up with the idea of modernising the BBC by getting rid of the ‘B’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ to make it ‘more like an app’. Clearly the same logic has been applied to the Proms: get rid of the audience and singing to make it more like . . . well, pretty much anything you want, apart from the actual Proms.

SCOTLAND’S decision to make masks mandatory in schools sparked a tedious debate about whether pupils in england and Wales should follow suit. I don’t care either way — just so long as they go back. Not least because as soon as they do, all those women who have found themselves trapped in a 1950s hell of domestic drudgery will be free again — and the country will light up like a firecracker. Or to put it another way, there will be a few corks popping next week.

PRINCE Harry has spoken of his admiration for self-help authors, Brene Brown and Tristan Harris. ‘They are two people we absolutely adore, and we know,’ he gushed, adding: ‘We love them!’ We? Is that the Royal We, Harry — or the Meghan We?

UNIVeRSITIeS minister Michelle Donelan has urged vice-chancellors to ‘where possible try to prioritise those from disadvantaged backgrounds for admission this year’. I understand disadvantaged children need help but why should their wellbeing be at the cost of middle-class pupils? It’s this kind of reverse snobbery that infuriates parents who work hard to offer their children the best start — then find themselves penalised.

IS IT me or is Covid becoming an excuse for councils and local authorities to commit acts of civic sabotage with the impunity of your average medieval Pope?

Take the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan: he is presiding over a new network of cycle lanes across the capital which will, when the city eventually returns to normal, create gridlock, make it harder for ailing shops and businesses to recover — and increase pollution.

I’m all for encouraging cycling (I cycle myself), but doesn’t he understand that if you go too far and clog up the capital’s arterial roads you will, eventually, choke the life out of it?