Last month, BBC1’s Countryfile achieved its highest ratings ever. A whopping 8.7 million live viewers tuned in on 7 February, making it the most popular programme on British television that week (beating War & Peace, Six Nations rugby and Call the Midwife). Countryfile’s figures just keep rising, from an already-impressive average of 5.9 million viewers a week in 2014 and 6.2 million in 2015. So what is it about countryside telly that has the nation gripped?
“I imagine that it must be because our lives are so fast, in work and business and the world of technology,” says Adam Henson, who has been a Countryfile presenter for 15 years. “We’re slaves to our phones. If we can turn those off and just watch something gentle and beautiful and lovely – and interesting and informative – in our living rooms on a Sunday night, it’s a bit of respite and reality.”
Henson is filming a package about the Longlands Care Farm in Worcestershire, which helps youngsters who have social difficulties. It’s typical of the Countryfile agenda, which matches pretty pictures with gritty problems. “When foot-and-mouth hit the UK in 2001, John Craven did a few live Countryfiles – that was the year I joined the programme, and I remember thinking, ‘This is an amazing programme’.”
It wasn’t until 2009, though, that the then controller of BBC1, Jay Hunt, saw Countryfile’s audience potential and moved it to a prime early Sunday evening slot. The manner of the programme’s move caused the BBC some corporate difficulties, with presenter Miriam O’Reilly winning her ageism case for being ditched from the new line-up. But the slot was an instant hit with audiences – from a lunchtime average of 1.7 million viewers in 2006, ratings rose straight away in 2009 to a teatime average of over 5 million.
“And now,” says Henson, “if you go into the corridors of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, they’re all talking about what the next food-and-farming programme is.” Countryfile itself will get a new daytime spin-off in May, as Countryfile Diaries – presented, naturally, by veteran John Craven – and will air on five consecutive days on BBC1, following one of the main programme’s regular seasonal specials. And then, of course, there are what BBC insiders refer to as “the Watches” – BBC2’s Springwatch, Autumnwatch, Winterwatch – which could even be improving the nation’s health.
“There are academic studies, there’s even a name for it now – nature deficit disorder,” says Springwatch executive producer Tim Scoones. “If you have a deficit of nature, you get rises in obesity and depression and anti-social behaviour. Whether that’s just chiming into something we feel from a much more existential point of view, or whether it is genuinely a growing ailment of our modern society – when you then put beautifully executed countryside television on screen, I know it’s vicarious and indirect, but that still helps.”
Springwatch also, as Scoones points out, encourages people to actually get outdoors. Just a few days ago, the Easter Springwatch special kicked off a pan-BBC “Do Something Great” campaign, urging viewers to join in big beach cleans organised by the National Trust, the Marine Conservation Society, and others. And, by virtue of the “mini cams” that it places in the nests of breeding wildlife (such as last year’s surprise fish star “Spineless Simon”, a romantically-challenged stickleback), Springwatch offers a virtual bucolic experience to people who can’t access the real thing. “We get a lot of correspondence from old people, and people who have recently become disabled, saying: ‘This is a lifeline for me, because I used to go out and do this myself, but now I can’t,’” says Scoones.
This year, for the first time, the viewer-led companion show Springwatch Unsprung – which began online-only – will air five evenings a week on BBC2 at 6.30pm. Yet despite the massive online conversation that goes on around Springwatch, countryside programmes underscore how linear TV continues to dwarf on-demand. That highest-rating episode of Countryfile, with 8.7 million viewers for 60 minutes, notched up over 520m viewer-minutes for BBC1 in a single hour. During that entire week, according to the TV Player Report from ratings body Barb, the entire on-demand offer of the BBC iPlayer recorded only 499.7m viewer-minutes on computer, tablet and mobile. In the TV ratings world, haystacks are still giant.
The countryside is also changing the way that mainstream TV is made. Studio-based entertainment shows such as The X Factor are losing ever more viewers – while the BBC’s biggest hit, The Great British Bake Off, is made in a tent at a country house. Sky1’s physical game show Wild Things is set in woodland, as is ITV2’s RTS-award-winning Release the Hounds. And, in a world of staged celebrity reality shows, BBC2’s observational documentary series This Farming Life – following five Scottish farming families over a year – has struck a note of authenticity with viewers.
“It’s proper reality TV,” says This Farming Life’s executive producer, Lisa Ausden. “One of our farmers is called Sybil, and a viewer tweeted: ‘We need more Sybils in this life, and fewer Kardashians’.” Ausden makes a virtue out of the constraints under which her team labours, not least the lack of production money. “When you’re working, as we are, on very challenging budgets – and therefore very small camera crews, or giving farmers their own camera – you get a candidness, an honesty. It’s very, very intimate.”
Though she can’t yet disclose any firm plans, Ausden admits there is talk about what kind of farming series to make next. Yet whatever new offspring it spawns, some things about Countryfile itself will never change – which is a big part of why its audience loves it. There’s the seven-day weather forecast, and Henson names two other elements that will stay in the show’s DNA forever. “Although the camera people and the directors try and capture beautiful shots, Countryfile is real. It isn’t a chocolate-box-image show, it’s a real show. I think that honesty and integrity and value in what we do is crucial,” says Henson. “And, of course, John Craven.”