100 years of bbc rural tv & radio

You wouldn’t expect a cow impression to have much gravitas; but then you wouldn’t expect the great Richard Burton to do the mooing. The renowned thesp lends his resonant Welsh tones to the 1960 BBC documentary, Borrowed Pasture, about two Polish ex-soldiers struggling to make a living from a derelict farm in Carmarthenshire. It’s an unromanticised, mud-caked examination of their lives, but Burton’s lyrical narration gives Dylan Thomas a run for his money. Yes, even with the mooing.

It’s just one of the charming forgotten treasures from the BBC’s broad and eclectic countryside coverage over the past 100 years. Many of these shows are known to almost every household in the land. Among such stone-cold classics are, of course, magazine series such as Countryfile, which was first broadcast in 1988, and Springwatch, which made its debut in 2005. Both have enjoyed wild success, as have travelogues such as Coast, a seashore odyssey that first aired in 2005, and lifestyle shows such as Escape to the Country (2002), where willing participants attempt to uproot from urban to rural. Beyond these stalwarts, there are shows about agriculture, birdwatching, fishing, flowers, canal voyages, wild swimming and dodging-the-rain-at-the-seaside.

Comedies and dramas also celebrate the UK landscape – who would deny that the Yorkshire Dales were as much a part of the charm of Last of the Summer Wine (1973) as Compo, Foggy and Clegg? And detective dramas seem especially thrilling when tackling crime in rustic splendour, from Hamish Macbeth (1995) in the Highlands to Bergerac (1981) moonlighting for the Jersey tourist board. The dashing 18th-century drama of Poldark is ramped up by spectacular shots of smouldering characters in period attire on windswept Cornish coasts, while the grand houses and romantic rural settings of Pride and Prejudice (1995), created a worldwide hit, as millions tuned in to watch Mr Darcy and Elizabeth stumble towards love.

The BBC even boasts the only soap ope