Jimmy's Farm

How does a 28-year-old Essex cheeky chappie with a hankering to run a pig farm, using rare breeds to produce top-class gourmet sausages, make his dream come true? Well, he can scrimp and save, work his way up, borrow money from the bank and eventually reach the point where he might be able to afford the smallest of small-holdings.

Or he can get a TV company interested, allow himself to be followed around by the cameras and then call in his old celebrity schoolmate Jamie Oliver to provide the cash he needs. Which is just what Jimmy Doherty does in this new four-part series.

Jimmy is a student - an expert on insects - who has decided he wants to do that whole Good Life thing. But you have to suspect that without the Jamie Oliver connection his story would never have made it on to our screens, because Jimmy is just a blokeish dreamer.

"Starting this farm is a way for myself to get back to nature, to plug my hands directly back into the soil, and live a life that is like being a child again," he explains to his bemused mother. "I want to get away from the dry, dusty world of academia and get back to real life."

With such dewy-eyed romanticism, it's tempting to think that he doesn't have far to travel to be like a child again. And, if he's rearing pigs, it'll be something more than soil that his hands get plugged into.

The fact that he has no experience of farming whatsoever doesn't deter him from his new passion. And to make life even more difficult, he decides to take on a tumbledown farm that has been unoccupied for 13 years and has no water or electricity. The boy's a fool.

This series is clearly meant to be in a similar vein to No Going Back or Risking It All, where we follow the pursuit of a dream.

The trouble here is that, despite his charming enthusiasm, Jimmy's got so little idea about what he's doing, and the project is such a pipe dream, that there seems to be only one possible outcome: he'll end up in the stuff that pigs love.