Addicted To Sheep
‘Same as a woman putting on make-up in the morning. She doesn’t do it to look worse.’ Okay, these words don’t speak of great wisdom and sensitivity when it comes to the female sex, but perhaps you’ll forgive Pennines farmer Tom Hutchinson in Addicted To Sheep (Monday, BB C Four, 9pm) for his man-ofthe- soil rough way with words as he explains what he’s doing while he’s shearing one of his livestock. Swaledale sheep, insists Tom, are ‘one of the worst addictions known to mankind’, and caring for the ones living on his farm seems to occupy every waking moment for him and wife Kay. It’s exhausting just watching them trudge through the mud and the snow and the dark all through the year and at all hours, so heavens knows what it must be like to live their life.
But this isn’t the kind of destructive self-hating existence one finds with other kinds of addictions: unless the family are very good actors when the camera’s about, they truly adore their idyllic throwback to yesteryear. Ah yes, you wonder, but what about their young children Jack, Hetty and Esme – surely they’re longing to get away and find adventure in the Big Smoke? Well, one of them’s at the local primary school when the teacher asks who lives on a farm – and everyone puts their hand up. And who likes living where they live? Immediately up goes the same forest of arms, and there, in a cosy classroom, is the future of British farming.
NOT TO BE MISSED...
Earth’s Greatest Spectacles Fri, BBC2, 9pm Behold the intoxicating beauty of New England’s vast forest of trees turning gold and brown in the fall, in the first of a new three-part series.
The X-Files Mon, C5, 9pm
The FBI’s files on the bizarre and supernatural are reopened as Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny return to star as Mulder and Scully (left).
Happy Valley Tues, BBC1, 9pm
Sarah Lancashire is back: a new case begins for her police sergeant after a body is found dumped in a garage (rght).