Countryfile betrays the countryside
Seven million watch it. But CHRISTOPHER BOOKER says the BBC’s flagship show ignores rural Britain’s real problems
ONE OF the BBC’s most spectacular recent success stories is the weekly wildlife and farming programme, Countryfile. Regularly watched by up to seven million viewers on Sundays, it enjoys the highest ratings of any ‘factual programme’ on British TV — even at times attracting higher viewing figures than Coronation Street.
Much of Countryfile’s appeal to its huge audience lies, of course, in the way it presents such a glowing picture of two of the most photogenic subjects any cameraman or producer could wish for.
On one hand it shows us breathtaking shots of Britain’s beautiful countryside — lakes and rivers, mountains and rolling hills, woods emerging from the mist. And also we get stunning close-ups of birds and other wild creatures, interspersed with farm animals which invariably look fetchingly well cared for and contented.
Each programme races through items on different aspects of country life, with its presenters often shown walking along or striding out of shot, to give a sense of urgency.
Above all, the picture they present is relentlessly positive and upbeat.
But this is precisely what gives rise to the most commonly heard criticism of Countryfile from those who know about nature and life in the countryside at first-hand: the programme prettifies, sentimentalises and sanitises what goes on there. Anything which contradicts the Countryfile agenda is seemingly airbrushed out of the picture.
Two lengthy items in one recent edition illustrate this vividly. These were on two of the show’s favourite subjects — the decline in numbers of farmland birds, and the proliferation across rural Britain of windfarms.
To anyone who knew our countryside 50 years ago, as I did, the disappearance of so many of our most loved and attractive birds has indeed been one of the tragedies of our time.
Countryfile’s explanation for this focused on the damage done by the intensive farming and toxic chemicals which have destroyed much of the birds’ habitat and the plants and insects which provided them with food.
But there is another massively important factor in the decline of so many bird species. This is the uncontrolled explosion in predators which feed on them — not just other birds, such as magpies, sparrowhawks and buzzards, but, just as significantly, foxes, badgers and even mink.
So determined is the programme to present its own view of what goes on in the countryside that little mention is made of the havoc being wrought by these predators.
In a recent programme, a wildlife photographer tried to draw the attention of presenter Adam Henson to the damage done to lapwings (common plovers) by foxes. But Henson immediately changed the subject as if the predator problem hadn’t been mentioned.
no one has been more vocal in trying to draw attention to the devastation being wrought on other forms of wildlife by the predator explosion than Cambridgeshire farmer Robin Page, whose Countryside Restoration Trust has shown how proper farmland management, including control of predators, can produce a dramatic return of wildlife, from birds to butterflies.
But when he appeared on Countryfile to explain this, it seemed the intention was to portray him as someone wanting to destroy our beautiful birds of prey.
Any references to how sensible control of their numbers can promote the survival of many other birds seem to have ended up on the cutting room floor. In fact, the damage done by predators goes much further than just to ground-nesting birds. One of the saddest losses to our countryside in recent years has been the 90 per cent decline i n the number of hedgehogs — caused not least by the fourfold increase in the number of badgers, for whom hedgehogs are a favourite delicacy.
When Countryfile filmed one of our leading hedgehog experts, Rebecca Willers of the Shepreth Wildlife Park, she was allowed to mention how many hedgehogs were killed on roads and how they suffered by a loss of traditional habitat such as hedgerows, but no comments about the hugely destructive part played by badgers made the broadcast.
In this sentimentalisation of predators, from badgers and foxes to red kites, Countryfile is simply lining up with the ‘environmentalists’ and animal rights campaigners who run our powerful green lobby groups, including, alas, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. When it came to that contentious badger cull and the disaster being inflicted on dairy herds by the runaway epidemic of TB caught from our exploding badger population, TV in general invariably liked to show us only healthy animals gambolling outside their setts.
We never saw those thousands of sickly badgers facing a prolonged and painful death from a disease which each year forces the slaughter of tens of thousands of cattle.
When dealing with the harsh realities of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, the BBC is happy to have David Attenborough giving a breathy commentary in faraway Africa. But the colossal damage done to many forms of wildlife in Britain by our vastly increased numbers of badgers and other predators is not on the Countryfile agenda.
The other item in that recent edition was yet another example of how this programme has l ong played a leading role in pushing the BBC’s bias in favour of windfarms. Always the big giveaway here is the Corporation’s refusal to mention the real problem with wind energy, which is the unpredictable intermittency of the wind.
One week, windfarms may generate quite a lot of electricity, the next the wind drops and they produce scarcely any — and this creates huge technical difficulties which the BBC never wants to mention.
Countryfile’s chief investigative reporter, Tom Heap, does not even try to hide his enthusiasm for windmills. In this piece, he did at least interview a Cornish anti-windfarm campaigner who has to live with a monster turbine a few hundred yards from his home, and who was allowed briefly to question whether wind energy is really that efficient.
But Heap could not wait to pour scorn on the poor chap. How could he possibly suggest wind power doesn’t work when that very windmill outside his door might be keeping his lights on and even boiling the cups of tea they were drinking?
What Heap invariably wants to do, like many of his BBC colleagues, is to give the impression that those who oppose windfarms do so only because they are short-sighted nimbies who don’t like the look of them towering over the countryside.
The one question which must never be discussed is how we are to keep Britain’s lights on when, as the Government ( and Countryfile) wish, we have closed down our CO2-polluting fossil-fuel power stations, and have to rely increasingly on windfarms which for many windless weeks in the year scarcely generate any power at all.
The real reason why we might be concerned by Countryfile is not just that such a popular programme should, on many contentious issues, show such pronounced bias. It is that it so obviously acts as a platform for many of the pressure groups which share that same skewed agenda.
It is telling, for instance, that when Countryfile talks about windfarms it automatically goes for an interview to Renewable-UK, the commercial lobbyists for an industry which stands to make billions out of the subsidy bonanza that has been created for all forms of renewable energy.
BUT the same kind of ‘ environmentalist’ make-believe has taken hold of many once respected institutions. One might expect the RSPB to be vociferous in protesting at how many birds (and bats) are killed each year by the spinning blades of our thousands of giant wind turbines. But it has become so close to the wind industry it even receives a regular income from one of our giant power companies which builds windfarms.
So keen is the RSPB to promote the image of those golden eagles and other iconic birds of prey, many of which are sliced up by the same wind turbines, that it seems never to accept this awkward fact.
And when the RSPB recently boasted about how one of its bird reserves had shown a dramatic increase in species such as lapwings and snipe, it took dogged research by Robin Page to unearth the fact that the RSPB had only managed this by its local warden’s strict control of predators. Another once respected institution which has been taken over by the animal rights lobby is the RSPCA, which was why it spent colossal amounts of its donors’ money on bringing very expensive and often unsuccessful private prosecutions against hunts which it alleged were breaking the hunting ban.
Countryfile was too canny to give active support to that campaign. But when, in marking the 10th anniversary of the hunting ban, it briefly showed a distant shot of animal rights activists fighting with huntsmen, what it didn’t reveal was that these fanatical ‘sabs’, disguised in balaclavas, had been attacking the huntsmen with iron bars.
The trouble with this woolly-minded ‘environmentalism’ is that it throws up so many contradictions.
If Countryfile wants to parade its passion for the natural ‘environment’, why doesn’t it question the immense damage being done to that ‘environment’ by thousands of vast industrial wind turbines?
Why, when it comes to saving our wildlife, are skylarks and lapwings so much less important than the badgers and foxes which are among their deadliest enemies? In short, Countryfile acts as the flagship for a sentimental and largely urban view of the countryside — as a pretty place full of cuddly foxes and badgers whose only enemies are cruel hunters and greedy farmers.
In reality, nature and the countryside are far more complicated. But the fluffy-headed ‘environmentalists’ in charge of Countryfile never want to tell us that.
They have found that the secret to bumper viewing figures is to sell us a pleasingly make- believe i mage which in many respects is no more than a beguiling but, in fact, rather nasty fake.