Open Country
Radio 4
The first programme in a new series of Open Country (31 October, 3pm) (“featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of Britain”) did everything that fans would recognise: started off boring and ended up with us completely in thrall to the presenter, Helen Mark.
As usual, Mark was exceedingly bossy and had people scuttling about making things appear immediately before her. “I’m on the way with Steve Cramp,” she declared in her firm, Borders-meets-Ulster accent (I believe she has worked in both places), taking her seat in a little carriage travelling along a mile stretch of 1860s railway track in Leicestershire originally built to remove quarried stone, which over the past seven years has been renovated by local volunteers. “I think I get to blow the horn, don’t I? [clearly this was rhetorical] Let’s Go!” Steve could do little but comply and for a time we heard nothing but chugging.
“Oh it’s a very throbbing little carriage!” cried Mark. (That’s another brilliant thing about her. Who else could say this without a hint of innuendo?) “Let’s stop at this bridge,” suggests Steve after a while, having banged on a little tediously about the local council (“Unfortunately, RVP didn’t get planning permission, so . . .”) A drop in temperature. “Why do you want to stop at the bridge?” challenged Mark. “Oh . . .” gulped Steve, who forgot why. Mark always gets her man. Later she met Kevin, a volunteer who travels from Paris once a month to help cut back briars and clear track (yes, I thought it sounded weird too, Helen). “It’s an investment!” he blustered. “In you, in the railway, or what?”
Ah, Mark! I remember once, in a programme about Hastings, she rounded Nancy Drewishly on a fishmonger called Arthur, needling him about the species he had been selling that week. “Plaice, sole, grey mullet, shad . . .” His voice was increasingly small, thrown by this inexplicably intense middle-aged brunette in a navy fleece standing uninvited at his counter. “Shad?” Mark narrowed her eyes. “It’s between a herring and a sea bass,” appealed Arthur. You definitely want Mark inside your tent pissing out.
Ten minutes into the programme it was evident that the people of Mountsorrel in Leicestershire were exceptional. Local cancer sufferers thought nothing of going at thorn tangles along the track with garden shears just days after chemotherapy. Twitchers stood about noting the resurgent cuckoo.
Having eaten a restorative plum from a volunteer’s basket, Mark was chugged further down the track, halting the carriage to talk to two little girls gravely building no less than a hedgehog hut. One couldn’t help thinking of Tilda Swinton in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe leaning from her fur-swaddled snowmobile to interrogate a small party of forest creatures feasting on delicious food brought to them by Father Christmas. What on earth were they doing there? “We want to learn old stuff,” explained the children. “You know – what kids did when their mums and dads were younger!” Mark paused, but then nodded and swept on her marvellous way.
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