HARVEST, BBC2, 8pm
This series has been utterly charming and it’s rare that we can say such a thing about a factual programme. It has been a short, three-part series celebrating the British harvest. For city dwellers it might be easy to forget that such a thing still occurs because our food comes from trucks, supermarkets and tightly-wrapped cling film packages, surely?
Are there still workers toiling in the fields and bringing in the harvest? What a quaint image, but it’s nonetheless a realistic one and this series brings the reality to us whilst, to its credit, still retaining a little hint of the harvest’s bucolic romance. Tonight’s episode is the last in the series and takes place in the most dreamy and pastoral setting of all: the cider apple harvest in the Somerset countryside.
Of course, being a TV programme it must inject drama, so presenters Gregg Wallace and Philippa Forrester position the harvest as a competition: has the wet August “washed away” the harvest? Will there be a sizeable enough crop? Never fear, because British growers are “at the top of their game!”
If you can push aside the exclamations of the presenters you can enjoy the scenery and fascinating little quirks of the apple harvest such as the method for detaching the fruit from the trees: there is no rosy maiden plucking them into a basket. Instead a machine grabs the trunk and violently shakes the tree, sending the apples flying and bouncing like red tennis balls.
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