Another sweet success for Kate, the queen bee of countryside TV

Talking shop over red wine and quinoa salad at their north london dinner parties, television executives have a special jargon for those attention-grabbing shows that generate excited chatter on social media. They call them ‘noisy’.

But on TV, just as in life, it’s the quiet ones you need to watch.

never mind the hype and the big-name casts, the spectacular credit sequences and the acres of pre-publicity.

That hasn’t saved the Sunday night nazi spy thriller SS-gB from losing more than two million viewers. nor has it enabled Matt leBlanc’s Top gear to attract as many fans as teatime editions of low-budget quiz games Pointless or The Chase.

One of the BBC’s most consistently popular programmes, pulling in seven million viewers every week, is the modest and restful Countryfile. it’s a peculiar success that only works on Sundays: attempts to extend it across the week have always faltered.

But former Springwatch presenter kate Humble appears to have hit on a way to take Countryfile’s bucolic format and inject it with a little mid-week urgency, in Back To The Land (BBC2). The result is a business magazine show with the focus on profit margins and cash flow. Yet it leaves you with a gentle yearning for an office with views of dewy mountains.

For the first instalment of her new series, kate was in West Wales, meeting entrepreneurs who had taken a gamble on rural businesses with a 21st- century twist. One farmer was breeding Japanese cattle called Wagyu, barely bigger than ponies, that produced exceptionally succulent beef.

This wasn’t an old-fashioned matter of leading Buster the Bull to a meadow of cows and letting him get on with it. The calves were conceived by iVF, at a lab in australia, using bull semen at £1,500 a go.

another breeder, on a smaller scale, was honey aficionado nick, who reared bees from larvae and posted them off to fellow hive enthusiasts all over the Uk. These were queen bees . . . so of course they went by Royal Mail.

nick’s bees supped gorse blossoms and wildflowers beside the Cleddau river. little wonder the honey tasted like heaven — or that a small jar cost as much as a decent bottle of wine.

We met a couple who made soap from goat’s milk and chopped up the bars with the frame of a piano — and a seaweed harvester who sold minced kelp called Welshman’s Caviar from his solar-powered beach shack.

kate didn’t disguise how precarious these businesses are, and how much sheer graft is involved.

But she didn’t apologise either for making the rural life look so idyllic.

Motherhood was less idyllic than an utter nightmare, for Morven Christie as highly-strung architect Ellen in The Replacement (BBC1). Sleepless nights and visits from social services were capped by a scene at a funeral so funny yet so embarrassing it made your teeth hurt. This psychological thriller threatened last week to turn into a run- of-the-mill murder inquiry. But it didn’t, because none of the characters seem to care very much who pushed Ellen’s boss to her death at a building site.

The real mystery is whether it’s Ellen or her rival Paula (Vicky McClure), her stand-in for maternity leave, who is suffering from paranoid delusions. Perhaps they both are, and it’s really their philandering employer (Dougray Scott) who is orchestrating the mind-games.

The Replacement has a pleasing gothic twist to its febrile imaginings. it’s mad, in a good way.