Last night’s CHRISTOPHER STEVENS TV review: Never laugh at the Earth Girl with the 5ft serrated saw
A Farm Through Time (C5)
Rating: 
Hotel Custody (ITV)
Rating: 
All right, chaps, stand down. It’s time to put the ladies in charge. You do not know there is a war?
Historian Ruth Goodman and the Women’s Land Army are showing boys how to deal with a crisis, as A Farm Through Time (C5) reimagines World War II.
In their velvet trousers and high-waisted sweater, Land Girls Leanne, Charlotte and Faye demonstrated the hand-cranked potato beater, a manual conveyor belt that sort tubers into different sizes.
A Farm Through Time presenters Dave and Rob Nicholson, contributors Charlotte, Leanne and Faye – they’re having a sawing contest
Contributors Charlotte, Leanne and Faye – World War 2 Working Girls on a Farm
They then took a two-handed saw and headed into the woods at the National Trust’s Tatton Park in Cheshire to cut some logs.
The women in the jungle were known as the Timber Jills in the 1940s – I imagine though I couldn’t see their faces.
It’s not prudent to laugh at a woman with large biceps and a serrated metal blade 5ft long.
Ruth, who plowed the soil on experimental farms in previous periods from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages and Victorian times, looked completely at home.
She claims to have never sheared a sheep before, but you wouldn’t have guessed it.
Her animal shows up with a brutal short smack – Brian May one minute, Peaky Blinders’ Tommy Shelby the next.
Presenters Rob and Dave Nicholson, 50-year-old farm brothers, obediently watched from the outside.
Then, like boys who expect a clip around their ears at any moment, they followed Ruth into the kitchen and helped her prepare dinner.
The recipe is a vegetable stew under a thin pastry crust, a wartime classic known as Lord Woolton Pie, named after the World War II food minister.
It was heavy on the carrot, which, according to the legend of the time, was good for night vision. Rob agrees: “You never see a rabbit with glasses.
Rob and Dave might consider themselves lucky to get a certain dinner, because unlike the women, they spend the day getting everything right.
Given a Fordson tractor, they were challenged to plow a straight line. One engine stalled, the other could not be stopped.
The result resembles a trench in World War I.
Presenters Dave and Rob and Roger Nicholson at Tatton Park for A Farm Through Time
Next week, they’ll be back in the Thomas Hardy era, when women ran dairy factories and a gentleman farmer’s job was to lean on his gate and smoke his pipe.
You have to be able to deal with it. Meanwhile, we are having food shortages and wars in Europe. Maybe it’s time to revive the Female Earth Army.
However, there is no possibility of a return to wartime policy. Their methods are too austere for today’s justice system.
An overnight cell sergeant in Grimsby, on Hotel Custody (ITV), agrees the £14m facility is a luxury.
“Those arrested are guests to a certain extent,” he said. ‘It’s a bit like one of your busiest hotels. We will treat them as customers rather than prisoners. ‘
Each individual cell has an intercom system and inmates are encouraged through to request whatever they love, such as snacks, drinks or magazines.
A sergeant in charge of an overnight cell in Grimsby, on Hotel Custody (ITV)
Each individual cell has an intercom and inmates are encouraged to come through to request whatever they love, such as snacks, drinks or magazines – Hotel Custody
Some guests do not appreciate the five-star conditions.
One man, drunk and drugged, could do nothing but scream.
Another woman, arrested at the end of a lavishly dressed party, insisted she must be innocent because she did not remember punching a policewoman.
Many detainees were released after they came to their senses. One philosophy officer commented: ‘How they’re living their lives, they think it’s normal. What is normal now? ‘
If we want to giggle about this, I can’t. It’s just too depressing.
Source: | Dailymail.co.uk
