Hot TV CHOICE

Watching Channel 5, you’d never guess the UK had 109 counties, so smitten are C5 chiefs with one in particular – Yorkshire, its famous sons (like Michael Palin) and all its creatures great and small. You probably can’t budge there for camera crews. If it weren’t for Jeremy Clarkson baling hay in Oxfordshire, you’d never know there were farms anywhere else. But of course the county is gorgeous and its farm tales wholesome.

Tonight’s trips to the county are to A YORKSHIRE FARM (7pm, Channel 5) and to see

REUBEN: LIFE IN THE DALES (8pm, Channel 5). In the first, sleep-deprived farmers Rob and Dave Nicholson cope with lambing season round the clock. The arrival of triplet lambs pushes them to the limit, especially when they’re also coping with the rest of their menagerie and with the unexpected emergency of a deer injured in a car crash.

Reuben’s series offers an education in heavy farm machinery. The enterprising teen oversees a motley collection of temperamental vehicles, and when the electrics in his track dumper (no, me neither) falters on the job, he’s got to make running repairs. But come on, Channel 5, how about branching out to cover farming in Flintshire or sowing seeds in Sussex?

Elsewhere, what a glorious series WILDLIFE RESCUE (8pm, Channel 4) is! While the Yorkshire lot deal with farm animals, the team at South Essex Wildlife Hospital rescue wild animals. My tear ducts got a heck of a workout watching them teach deer fawn Lily how to suckle after being abandoned – by introducing her to fellow fawn, Rosie, who shows her how to drink from a bottle.