Stars: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Summary: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall escapes to the country and begins a new life in River Cottage in Dorset. This is his story.

Some may think of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as slightly eccentric. After all his books feature chapters on the best way to catch and eat the likes of garden pigeons and squirrels. However, amongst the slightly less practical features he provides a wealth of information on sensible ways to escape the urban sprawl and live off the land. This series follows Hugh and his family as they set about turning River Cottage into a self sufficient paradise with flowers, vegetables and their own livestock and includes advice on recipes that use ingredients that can be grown and caught.

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It's easy to be cynical about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's adventures as a downshifted smallholder in Escape to River Cottage; after all, given his fame and fortune, he could upshift again faster than a BMW sports gearbox whenever he chose. "Why don't yougive it a go?", he asks us. Because we don't all have fat media contracts to fall back on, we roll our eyes and reply.

However, despite HF-W's seeming like a Posy Simmonds character, the fact remains that no TV chef has come close when it comes to reminding the supermarket generation about where food really comes from, or indeed where it shouldcome from, as well as the values of indigenous produce (also a largely overlooked aspect of macrobiotics, incidentally). In this well-stuffed double DVD set Weirdly-Eatingall does alarming things with a goose, smokes fish in his chimney, eats his rather cute pigs, monitors the movements of mice by marking them with lipstick (why does he just happen to have some lippy lying around?) and, almost in passing, cooks up some wonderful dishes with his home-grown ingredients.

On the DVD:Escape to River Cottagetwo-disc set includes six episodes, plus a bonus in the form of the Christmas special. Extras are on-screen recipes, F-W's biography and some outtakes, which are deeply unfunny except when various things decide to bite the presenter, which they do fairly often. The extras are duplicated on both discs, which is pointless and/or a bit of a swizz. --Roger Thomas

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 0
Special Features:	Scene Indexing, Recipes, Biography Of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Outtakes
Year:	1999
Release Date:	September 6, 2003
Runtime:	168 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	A V 9300
Keywords:	River, Two, Cottage, General, Escape, Discs, Documentaries, Biographies
Genre:	Documentaries & Biographies