‘It’s made by the urban elite for the urban elite’: How Countryfile betrayed rural Britain

Countryfile has been “hijacked.” So says Jeremy Clarkson of the BBC’s flagship rural affairs show – one that “used to be jolly good.” Just shy of its 36th birthday, Clarkson has criticised it for alienating its core viewers, dubbing Countryfile “a smörgåsbord of everything that’s necessary for a modern-day television programme to be commissioned”.

Clarkson, whose series, Clarkson’s Farm, has currently returned to Amazon Prime, might once have been an unlikely oracle on a programme about country life. But having largely won over the agricultural community since trading Top Gear for tractors, his warts-and-all insight into the realities of farming appears to have highlighted Countryfile’s shortcomings. In recent months, criticism of the programme appears to be coming from viewers and farmers alike.

“Genuine country people are pretty disparaging about it – those of us who are actually part of the rural economy,” says farmer and writer Jamie Blackett, who has 1,250 acres of arable and dairy land in Dumfries and Galloway. Countryfile “can be pretty much guaranteed, from a rural perspective, to be on the wrong side of every argument.”

Blackett was riled by a segment on solar panels last month, which he says “helped to peddle the myth that you can still graze a few sheep on solar farms while you’re still farming and producing food, which is really just barely a half truth; it’s a sort of quarter truth.” The biodiversity damage done by covering land with solar panels was scarcely touched, he adds. “You’re going to lose all your skylarks and lapwings and barn owls.”

Controversy has also followed pieces on hunting and conservation issues; a visit to a wetlands reserve in January led to accusations that the show is now “a climate-change mouthpiece”. (Clarkson also railed at a piece extolling the benefits of badgers in the wild, and a reference to the gestation period of “people,” as opposed to “women.”)

“They [have] somebody on the extreme left and somebody on the soft left talking,” Blackett says of those featured on Countryfile. “They would very rarely have somebody like me on the programme to say things they don’t want to hear.” Michael Oakes, a dairy farmer on the outskirts of Birmingham and former chair of the National Farmers Union (NFU’s) National Dairy Board, adds that during his tenure, “there were several times we put in official complaints to Ofcom because we didn’t feel that there was a balance.”

In 2022, the programme was part of an internal review carried out by the BBC, with an insider at the time telling the Telegraph that “Countryfile has to deal with some contentious issues that bring out differing views... the kinds of issues Countryfile covers make it a good barometer for impartiality.” A BBC spokesperson said: “Countryfile is enjoyed by millions of viewers every week, reporting on a breadth of viewpoints, perspectives and analysis about issues impacting rural communities in each episode… There will, of course, be occasions when people have views on the content of the programme, and we have well-publicised routes for them to share these with us.”

Countryfile began as a Sunday lunchtime show in 1988 as a replacement for Farming, which had run for 30 years. “There was some criticism then by the farming community because obviously their programme had been removed and they were miffed at that,” Oakes remembers. Put succinctly, “farmers do not like Countryfile,” says Anna Jones, who worked on the show between 2006-2021. “There is this knee-jerk expectation that it should be a farming programme and it’s not. It’s a rural affairs programme for a massive audience.”

During Jones’s tenure on the programme the show moved to a prime-time Sunday evening slot, and accordingly the focus shifted, with many of the items having more of an entertainment feel; high-profile presenters Julia Bradbury and Matt Baker were recruited, too.

Naturally the gear change saw viewing figures grow, and at its peak in 2016, the show had 9.6m viewers – more than The X Factor, Jones points out. “I’m not naive, I know there’s going to be plenty of people that would want to talk to you about how rubbish Countryfile is, and how crap it is… [but] it has done some amazing work, and it has really put the countryside on the map.”

Jones is a farmer’s daughter, and the author of Divide: the Relationship Crisis Between Town and Country. It is this split that is responsible for the brouhahas surrounding the show, she thinks. “There is a massive divide between town and country and they are not necessarily cultures that understand each other very well… Countryfile could bend over backwards and try and do everything it could, but it would not overcome that cultural divide,” says Jones, who “gets it in the neck” at every farming event she attends. “There are lots of people that don’t even watch it that have written it off as ‘Towniefile.’”

This divide has become more pronounced given the strain currently plaguing those responsible for growing our food, who believe the show should better relay these challenges to the masses. Dreadful weather, labour shortages, “a real lack of margin and a lack of profitability in the supply chain” have battered farmers, says Oakes. “The vast majority of farmers don’t see that [Countryfile] relates to some of the struggles they go through… [it] tends to focus a lot on the soft and fluffy stuff rather than the realities of producing food.”

Other segments have also drawn ire – and confusion. Viewers were baffled recently by a piece on the difficulties in finding a rural dentist appointment – an issue they say is afflicting most of the country – and by one on ancient relics, which some less than generous social media users described as “scraping the barrel.” One viewer tells me that after years of watching, he has switched off in recent years, as the show “gives the impression of being produced by the urban elite for the urban elite… Programmes like Countryfile do a lot to alienate a large proportion of the rural population and might explain some of the distaste amongst many for the BBC.”

These criticisms of Countryfile reflect something wider, according to Roger Tabor, who presented the show during its inaugural two years. “The reality is obviously the public will change in the same way as the countryside itself is changing,” he says. “The way farming was when we came in was quite different to what it is now… We are going through a massive loss in terms of our wildlife in the countryside. Bird populations are absolutely crashing. so these are the sort of things that clearly Countryfile must now reflect.” Rural life “is not a static thing,” Tabor adds. “So there are bound to be changes.”

One of the show’s most enduring elements is the presence of Adam Henson, who has fronted Countryfile since 2001. “He’s certainly not somebody I would describe as in any way politically correct or woke or anything like that,” Blackett says, but “he probably has to bite his tongue a bit on Countryfile, and he probably can’t say things that perhaps he might want to say. The producers, I think, have quite a bit of power.”

On outside interventions, Tabor says that “there are limitations [on what can be covered]. And sometimes the Government gives pressure from the outside world” – noting that during his time on the show, the then-minister of agriculture “was leaning on the programme… because I wasn’t saying quite what he wanted me to say.”

Are presenters instructed to toe the line? “Certainly I don’t remember when I was doing it back in the early years that we were being told what we should or shouldn’t do. But of course it’s not just a presenter’s programme.”

Naturally this is where Countryfile splits from the Amazon behemoth, Jones says, because “Clarkson’s Farm is about one farm that belongs to a really famous guy who people watch because it’s Jeremy Clarkson.” While farmers may praise the broadcaster for bringing the community’s issues to the fore, she believes he has his predecessor to thank. “I don’t think you’d have Clarkson’s Farm without Countryfile,” Jones says. “It was the trailblazer.”

Jones might be right. But as the chasm between town and country widens, even this trailblazer may need to reconsider how to bridge the gap.