Review: River Cottage: Summer's Here

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall from River Cottage. Photo / Supplied

I am not a greenie. I am not a foodie. I do not have a vege garden. I don't even have a herb garden. I kill pot plants. I have never been to a farmers' market. I think food miles are a big con.

Yes, I always buy SPCA-approved Freedom Farms' bacon and the least Guantanamo-ed eggs I can find, but given my favourite snack is processed cheese on white bread, my credentials for loving back-to-the-earth gourmet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are woeful.

"More people are discovering the joys of getting good clean dirt on the fingers, feasting on their own home-grown produce and living within the seasons," he says with relish in his upcoming new series.

Not me, of course, but if anyone could get me planting peas and making gorseflower wine, it is this gorgeous bespectacled Old Etonian.

His latest Prime series, River Cottage: Summer's Here, cleverly scheduled just as you start getting the season's first whiff of mown grass, is evangelical about growing your own food but somehow not preachy.

And the serious animal rights segment about milk-fed veal is slotted between more appetising items on making pea soup and knocking up a parsley pesto.

It is hard to take HFW too seriously. Unlike the shrill Jamie Oliver, he is eccentric rather than fascist in his love for the bucolic life. HFW started as a TV chef but has evolved into a one-man Good Life campaigner, with a spin-off internet industry with rivercottage.net, but has kept his folksy persona thanks to some endearing self-deprecatory routines.

"We're not quite finished yet, darling," he says to the sheep he is trying to shear.

"When gorse is out of blossom kissing is out of fashion", and "When I am talking about wine I like to use pretentious French phraseology."

I could have done without some of HFW's terrible puns, though.

Actually, I think I know why I like HFW. It's not the posh tottiness, or the sensual gobbliness or the rustic authenticity. It's the fact he is a true revolutionary.

He has launched a service called Landshare to connect would-be gardeners with people who have spare land. In Britain, where people don't have big gardens, there is a seven-year waiting list to get an allotment. "Do you want to be part of the grow-your-own revolution?" he asks. He is so enthusiastic even I start to think that having an allotment is kind of sexy.

Usually, seeing people spinning the wool they have shorn from their sheep then knitting woolly pullies is the sort of thing I would scoff at. But HFW has even got me thinking of doing some planting.

Maybe I should start with something simple. If I could just keep my pot of parsley alive I could have some on my white bread and processed cheese sammy.

* River Cottage: Summer's Here debuts on Prime, Tuesday at 7.30pm.