THE LIE OF THE LAND
Sunday 10 July 2005 11.40pm-12.20am; 3am-3.40am
The Lie of the Land looks at how far Britain's rural heritage is based on fact and fiction. Our view of the countryside is hugely influenced by the idea of a rural idyll, but does this paradise really exist?
VIDEO NATION
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Tom Ware
Time Shift Series Editor
The rural idyll is a fundamental part of the British romantic tradition. But its images of quaint cottages, furrowed fields and abundant hedgerows belie a world where BSE, pollution and feudal poverty are the by-products of agri-business reality.
Carole Lochhead's Time Shift traces the history of how the countryside reinvented itself via the wartime propaganda of a homeland "fit for heroes", and how it maintains a hold over our collective imagination despite its ongoing suburbanisation today.
We see how protective legislation has isolated farmers from their traditional social role as custodians of the countryside, and how many of today's villages have been reduced to commuter towns. It's a bleak and powerful picture of a world at odds with the "Merrie Old England" of our nostalgia.
