Birds do it. Bees do it. Even captivated snails do it.
And as Big Week on the Farm (RTÉ One, Mon-Fri, 7pm) returns, an agri-tainment show broadcast live in what appear to be immensely stressful circumstances, ebullient presenters Áine Lawlor and Ella McSweeney seem slightly obsessed with it. Let's do it. Let's investigate animal husbandry.
Spring is in the air on the Shalvey family's dairy farm in Cavan, our hosts for the week, and to prove it they provide a home video of a recent calving – a natural birth, with no interception. This makes it quite different from almost every dramatic depiction of calving on TV, where frowning humans usually intercept way past their elbows. Left to their own devices, calves may come into the world with less buck and friction, which is not quite the manner of delivery for Big Week on the Farm.
In the studio, a live broadcast brings an added charge of excitement; beyond it, that excitement tips easily towards sheer panic. Despite its relentlessly upbeat depictions of our rich agrarian culture, that is the selling point of Big Week on the Farm.
Shot in a transparent marquee, which partly protects participants from the beautiful inconvenience of the great outdoors, the broadcast rattles by at such a brisk clip there is barely time to absorb or question anything. Why, for instance, has the show’s live audience been herded so tightly together on a tiny platform, standing less comfortably than the inhabitants of a crowded pen? Why don’t the consulting technical boffins, the agents of F.I.E.L.D., call their cattle measuring devices, “Moo-nitors?”
The first of a daily broadcast features live, fretful link-ups with farm-flung correspondents – Darragh McCullough reports from a sheep dairy in Mayo and Helen Carroll shells out information from a snail ranch in Carlow – along with a celebrity guest presenter. Tonight, it's Aobhín Garrihy, recent runner up in Dancing with the Stars, and a presence so ethereal that she is required by law to prove how down to earth she is at every given opportunity. This she does by gamely soliciting pictures of newborn animals from the viewer, while later participating in competitive milking challenge, Pull the Udder One.
The vagaries of the broadcast present a steeper test, though. When one video goes haywire, the camera cuts back abruptly to Garrihy, whose darting eyes are so imploring, and flummoxed facial expressions so expansive, she may give the show its first memeable moment.
Garrihy’s response is a relief; an assuring – and, yes, down to earth – confirmation of error, while everyone else seems more frantic by pretending that nothing is going wrong. This seems to be because the makers, anxious that the material doesn’t warrant it, still expect a level of enthusiasm from their presenters that borders on delirium. While Lawlor, resplendent in a pink houndstooth jacket, can gush winningly over a video about “the secret life of the egg” and McSweeney will affect paroxysms of suspense over a world-record attempt at making sausages at speed (which I took to be a metaphor for the show itself), this level of forced jollity finally seems unhinged. Poor Lawlor, who must laugh manically through one magnificently awkward introduction to Pull the Udder One, exclaims at another light-hearted but revealing moment: “Oh my God, I didn’t write this script.”
With a week still to go, these early glitches, mistakes, hesitations, runaway interviews and tight grimaces of joy are likely to settle down, of course. And that’s an immense shame.
