HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL is something of an obssession for me. In brief, Hugh is a 30-something London chef who decided one day to chuck all the trappings of smoggy industrial city life. Instead he buys a farm in Dorset, England, and begins to grow his own food and raise his own animals. For one year, he vows he'll try to grow, make, or barter everything he needs to live.

This doesn't sound very amusing. In fact, it sounds deadly dull, depressingly earnest and self-righteous, like serious hippies in Birkenstocks. But Hugh is not a hippy, and he's definitely not serious or dull by any stretch of the imagination. You see, the really entertaining part of this show, called River Cottage, is that Hugh has absolutely no idea what he is doing.

He gets mocked by his own pigs. He plants all his best vegetables in a slug-infested swamp. He stands tall, sodden by rain in the middle of a field with his hat drooping down to his ears, and delivers a lecture on why his wheat crop has just failed so miserably.

But never does Hugh get downcast. When he decides what he really needs to cheer himself up is to get roaring drunk, he offers up his slave labor to the Chidook Cider Circle, picking up apples and filling the monstrous beer presses with the laughing, drunk, elderly cider club in exchange for several barrels of hops (so that he can brew his own, of course). He's nice- genuinely friendly and interested in absolutely everyone. As a result, even the crustiest of farmers unbends enough to tell him how to grow the longest bean for the local garden club competition (which is rife with spying and sabotage). The gnarliest of fishermen give him a few extra lobsters after he works for a day pulling up whelk pots in the bay of Lyme Regis, with the added bonus that he's learning more about the specifics of fishing in his local bay.

He particularly delights in seeking out craftspeople who work for the love of what they do, and demands their goods in exchange for only the most pleasant of hard labor: getting several handmade pottery chicken pots for that perfect coq au vin in exchange for serving delicious make your own pizzas at the potter's Fire-The-Kiln-Night party; asking a local basketweaver to make him a seventeenth-century eel trap for his little stream in exchange for a special dish of Conger eel. As a chef, his shows generally center around the creation of some fantastic dish. As a crazy person, it's inevitably a dish that would make you cringe on a menu, but when Hugh makes it... it's bring on the calves testicles!

Sadly, Hugh is not available in the U.S. and he must be downloaded by getting yourself a Torrent program (BitComet, for example) and searching for 'River Cottage' on a Torrent Index website (isohunt.com, for example). Do it. Trust me. To whet your appetite, I give you Hugh: