OPINION: BBC’s farming show should be about farming

I confess, I was a little nervous when BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today rang and asked if they could do their Saturday show from Flindt Towers.

As you may know, most of the time I’m the shy and retiring type, scared of the limelight, always preferring to keep myself to myself. But show me a camera or a microphone, and I’m off, ranting and raving about some topic or other. And my favourite topic these days is the loathsome BBC – its 24-hour-a-day socialist agenda, its unbelievable profligacy, and, most of all, its scarcely disguised contempt for the genuine British countryside, as opposed to the hoppitty skippetty fluffy bunny Kate Humble version.

And all paid for by a tax on television ownership whether we watch the BBC or not. So a Beeboid waving a microphone in my direction could have been a recipe for trouble.

But the show was going to wrap up a week of episodes about rural crime, and my local plod had asked if I would help out by telling the listeners about Hampshire’s highly successful Countrywatch scheme. He also made me promise to behave. So I did.

Mind you, it wasn’t hard to behave. The three Beeboidettes were charming, the questions were easy, and it’s always easier to shout about something you feel is successful – like the Countrywatch scheme.

We drove round the farm in search of suitable venues – gateways with huge logs in them, vast sheeted gates, and fields still showing Subaru tracks across them.

The whole experience confirmed one thing I’ve always suspected: Farming Today is not meant for farmers. It’s a programme aimed at non-farmers. It wasn’t just that, of all the calls and emails I got, only one was from a farmer. It was that the questions are phrased – and you can’t help answering in the same vein – for listeners who know next to nothing about farming.

Saying “You can see wheelmarks over there next to the second tramline” would have been met with blank faces from the Beeboidettes, which would have matched the early morning puzzlement from listeners. Tramlines? In a field? In the end, “You can see wheelmarks over there” had to suffice.

As entertaining as it was, it made me more convinced than ever that the time has come for a BBC farming show aimed squarely at farmers. A show which could use farming terminology without then having to explain it. The risk to Hagberg numbers posed by OBM, for instance, without an idiot’s guide to what Hagberg and OBM were.

It’s too much to expect an hour of valuable television time – they need every minute for relentless cookery shows. But there must be space somewhere on the multitude of radio channels. If Labour Party propaganda were removed from the Today programme, there’d be a spare half-hour every morning on Radio 4.

And the BBC is quite happy to throw millions of our pounds away in useless IT projects, paying off dismal director generals and laying off senior “managers” – socialists are famous for being generous with other people’s money. The costs involved in producing a radio show are miniscule in comparison.

There’s always the question of who would present it. If only there was someone in the farming community with a good voice, who’s done a bit of radio work (Eurovision Song Contest correspondent for Wave105FM, for instance), a respectable knowledge of agriculture and the ability to operate a microphone and a recorder. Now, where would we find such a fellow?

Charlie Flindt is a tenant of the National Trust, farming 380ha at Hinton Ampner, Hampshire

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