River Cottage Spring

The phrase "TV chef" has today become synonymous with the phrase "attention-seeking baby." If they're not spitting expletives all over some Joe Public underling, then they're making soft-focus gastro-porn, serving up the pseudo-erotic kneading of pork belly as an appetizer and finishing off with spurts of double cream for the money shot.

Not so Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who returned to British screens this week for more of his shaggy-haired foraging of hedgerows and wholesome home-reared fare.

River Cottage Spring (Channel 4, Wednesday, 9 p.m.) is the latest in a long line of River Cottage series, which saw the urban dwelling cook leave the "big city" behind in the late '90s to live off the land in deepest, darkest rural England — Dorset, to be precise.

Since then, he's been eating roadkill, rearing pigs and generally aggravating vegans and vegetarians with his no-nonsense approach to carnivorous gastronomy. Hell, the man's even pan-fried a human placenta on TV.

HFW is a bizarre upper-class sort: the clipped English tones give away the privileged background (Eton College) but don't explain the down-to-earth personality. Earnest without being winsome, he's not only witty but also knows how to correctly spice the show, keeping it accessible, interesting and outre.

Take this season's opener, which has Hugh adopting a Ghanaian vegetarian as his butcher's assistant. To be fair, she wants to join in the meat-fest on the day of her wedding, and so Hugh plans to ease her in gently with the slaughter of a lamb. They begin with the preparation of offal and the veggie just about manages to consume a sliver of liver. What on paper sounds cruel and contrived is handled with sensitivity, wit and maturity.

We also see urban land being reclaimed for vegetables and animals, to be grown and reared by a mixed bunch of city folk: bourgeois liberals destined to befriend the poultry and suffer pangs of conscience when they get plucked; proles from the ghetto and their kids, who've been raised on McSlurry and screw their noses up at every proffered vegetable.

There is also heartfelt concern for the lives the animals lead pre-plate. HFW has always worn his ethical heart on his apron, and this show featured an update on his Chicken Out! campaign from earlier in the year, in which he tried to persuade the UK's big supermarkets to ban battery-farmed chickens from their shelves. Visibly teared and feathered during its making, Hugh's campaign saw organic free-range chickens fly off the shelves, and forced a temporary rethink from Tesco's et al.

Served up alongside the ethics and asparagus tips is something very rare for TV cookery shows: well-explained recipes. Slow, methodical, and enticing without being obscene, Hugh gives us the goods on hearty victuals using comestibles all hand-picked from his vegetable patch. Well, vegetable patches, as unlike in the early days of solitary sowing in the garden, HFW now has vast acreages of land and a band of merry farm-hands helping him tend them.

Unsurprisingly in our age of hyper-commodification, River Cottage has become yet another brand, churning out its own beer, cookbooks, chutneys and so forth. That said, the show and its genuinely eccentric presenter haven't lost the facets that has made it so consistently watchable since it began — the passion, humour and unpretentious presentation of recipes and basics of animal husbandry are all still present and correct.

In a time when TV schedules are saturated with piss-poor cookery shows and their chefs crying "Love Me!" with every high-speed slice'n'dice, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall remains, mercifully, a breath of fresh air.