Jimmy's Farm

Blaze the boar is depressed. Not even the arrival of some pretty lady-pigs at Jimmy Doherty's farm can cheer him up. (Sack your agent, Blaze. I bet she said you were up for a big part in Babe 3 - little did you know you were going to end up on midweek BBC2.)

Blaze isn't the only one having a tough time in this week's episode of the "look, mum, I'm a farmer" programme. Jimmy - the just-cute-enough-to-be-endearing-yet-you-still-think-he-could-do-with-a-kick-up-the-bottom wannabe pig-breeder - has been on the farm for two months, is rapidly spending his loan, yet still has no butchery; he has a half-tiled outbuilding.

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Enter Peter Gott, the no-nonsense pig farmer whom you might remember from the episode of Jamie's Kitchen when the stroppy young urbanites reluctantly spent a night under canvas in the Lake District.

Not only does Gott know everything there is to know about pork products, but he has invested a chunk of cash in Jimmy's new venture, and isn't too thrilled about the slow progress of the building works. (He also knows how to make sausages, a skill Jimmy could really do with learning if he wants to, er ... sell sausages.)

However, without Gott, it's debatable whether Jimmy would have had any incentive to get on with the work. Although he clearly knows he needs to make a few quid, he seems keener on watching the cute ickle porkers running around outside than building a butchery.

Which raises the question: why are we watching this chap learning the pigbreeding ropes? Amiable though Jimmy is, he's not as blinkered as some of the daft types on Channel 4's Risking it All or Property Ladder, which means we don't get the chance to laugh at ludicrous business decisions or cringe at disaster-prone plans.

Hold on, maybe Jimmy's Farm is a cause for celebration, marking a new age of television, in which we empathise with, rather than mock, the subjects of reality shows? Hmmm... looking at the Hell's Kitchen-and-Big-Brother-packed schedules, that's probably not the case.