Why Countryfile is the most political show on TV | Simon Jenkins

This is a programme that both celebrates country life and holds it to account. Now it has an 8 million-strong constituency - David Cameron, take note

Countryfile is my guilty secret. On a Sunday evening, when I want to sit back and not think too much, BBC1 offers me an hour of alternative reality. It offers a Britain that is beautiful yet real, hard-working yet leisured, a place without streets, housing estates or crowds, yet unmistakably British. Its star presenter, Adam Henson, does not lie in the grass contemplating the view with a piece of straw in his mouth. He works. But round him people are allowed to play.

This year, Countryfile broke through 8 million viewers, putting it in the same league as Downton Abbey and Strictly Come Dancing. The appeal of the programme to Britain's overwhelmingly urban population is undeniable. But is it what Henson claimed this weekend, that Countryfile offers not only space, a skyline, less light pollution, livestock, hills and mountains but also a "rural idyll", somehow a place apart?

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