Countryfile’s flowering achievement

IT’S unfair I know but I can’t stand BBC One’s Countryfile. You will say, reasonably: “Well turn over then.” But it’s worse than that.

Countryfile irritates me so much that I must watch, in the way you pick a scab, hating the bounciness of the presenters, their remorseless amiability, their eco goody-goodiness, their awful bright-eyed breeziness and lame jokes. And does it really go on for only an hour? It seems like four.

Which is why I maliciously enjoyed the story that the sainted Countryfile accidentally spread death and destruction throughout our green and pleasant land by posting out packets of poisonous corn-cockle seeds in an assortment of wild flowers. Some had even been planted by – oh no! – “local Brownies”. It was a scare story of course as many plants are poisonous and even “local Brownies” tend not to eat flower seeds which might, at the very worst, have given them a tummy ache.

Still, anything that gives Countryfile a headache…