33. 'Lambing Live'

At the beginning of the second decade of the third millennium, the British Broadcasting Corporation schedules 7 x 1 hour live OB programmes from a Welsh sheep farm, so that the viewers of Britain can watch the little lambies being born, and see something of farm life, and learn all sorts of things generally about sheep.

An hour, live, at 8pm, on BBC 2, with Kate Humble and some ginger bloke, from a barn, with some incredibly pregnant ewes.

Rapture.

If this isn't the most bizarre, wonderful, idiosyncratic, eccentric television programme in the whole history of this mad island, I don't know what is. They kept saying things like 'We'll just have a quick look around... oh look, there's a prolapsed uterus over there, better have a look...' and '...lots of you have asked if the ring method is the best way to dock the tails...'

Really? 'Lots of you'? REALLY? Now I'm sorry but surely all the other sheep farmers in the British Isles are out in a barn or on a hillside stuck up to the elbow inside Esmerelda the Ewe? So the only people inside watching this nutty, beautiful, prog are other soft layabouts like me and Herself? So who are the 'lots' of people asking if they are docking their lambies tails properly? I'm confused, and - obviously - missing out on some big national secret. As usual...

My favourite bit (apart from seeing the new lambs, natch) was the bit where the ginger bloke did an 'experiment' on one of his sheeps, making her wander down lanes made of hay bales looking at photos of his ugly mug. It was, honestly, both hysterically funny and oddly reassuring. Farmers are mad, sheep are brighter than what they look, there is nowhere on earth like this funny little island nation. I know my judgement is skewed, but Lambing Live made me laugh, and it made me proud. We get wrapped up in expenses scandals and imminent elections and lynch mobs, and we spend too much time looking West or East - and we forget that the daffs and the snowdrops are blooming, the lambs are gambolling and somewhere on a hillside nearby a taciturn bloke with a big beard is watching while his collie rounds up his sheep.

For those what haven't read Dick King-Smith's seminal work, The Sheep-pig - right at the very end, after Babe has learned all there is to know from Fly the collie and gone to the sheepdog trials with his master, and been allowed to have a go, and done a tip-top job, he is called back to his master's side. And the gruff old farmer pats the pig's head, and just says,

'That'll do, pig. That'll do.'

Sob.


Lambing Live - last episode tonight. You have to see it to believe it.