You can’t pull wool over our eyes, Kate.
“If you wanted lambing live, this really is it,” said Kate Humble, signing off Wednesday’s edition as Borders farmer Hamish Dyke yanked a lamb from a ewe whose cervix had contracted with ringworm.
It was a tacit admittance that what we’d been watching to that point was not so much Lambing Live as Pregnant Pause, as a shed full of expectant sheep either gave birth during EastEnders or waited until the watershed. The one thing they stubbornly were not going to do was introduce their lamb live on British television between 8 and 9pm.
“We could take bets on who is going to drop first?” offered Hamish, which gave me the idea that next year we could make this series a lot more viewer friendly by farming it out to BT Sport and have Ray Winstone offer us the latest in play odds during the adverts.
“Who’s goin’ ta spit one out next?” Ray could ask us in the Cockney accent he’s used for pretty much every role he’s played from Henry VIII to a confederate soldier in Cold Mountain. “The Bluefaced Leicester or the Scottish Blackface? Lay your bets naooww!”
“We’re certainly getting a lot of action,” opined an increasingly desperate Hamish. “Anytime now.”
With the sheep failing to follow their master’s entreaties like, er, sheep and not being a gambling man I was forced to look elsewhere for entertainment, such as pondering how best to describe square-jawed co-presenter Adam Henson, who lived up to a surname steeped in puppet history by appearing like a cross between Buzz Lightyear and the nodding dog in the Churchill ads.
I also took to counting the different hats Kate Humble wore through the week and wondered if she dispensed with the Red Army-style one she was wearing on Tuesday after the G7 announced sanctions on Russia (I actually sent this question in to the programme. It wasn’t answered, but I’m sure I caught Adam giving me a knowing nod).
Just to fill the time further we got a slow-motion replay of a sheep’s umbilical cord breaking.
“It’s not looking good at the moment,” a resigned Hamish finally admitted. If the farming doesn’t work out, he’ll make a fine TV reviewer.
Lambing Live, BBC2, Tuesday-Friday.
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