A country alliance

IT has not taken long for Clarissa Dickson Wright to find a new partner for her television double act. After the corpulent cookery of Two Fat Ladies, now there is Clarissa And The Countryman, alias One Fat Lady and One Tall, Thin Country Gent: townie cook and former barrister Dickson Wright and hill farmer and country columnist Sir Johnny Scott.

The new eight-part television series, showing on Fridays on BBC2, is being supported by a companion book, also entitled Clarissa And The Countryman. The book's promotional tour brought Clarissa and Johnny to York this month for the Way With Words Literary Weekend, when the worst flooding in the city for nigh on 400 years was nothing but a trifling inconvenience to two such hardy souls.

"They said there were no trains running to York but I didn't take any notice. There were trains, and we had no problems getting here," said the indomitable Clarissa, settling into the sofa alongside Johnny at The Grange in Clifton, the society hotel in York.

Whereas Clarissa and Jennifer Paterson were a partnership crafted in television executive land, Clarissa and Johnny have been friends since childhood. She was raised in St John's Wood, London, he on family estates in Sussex and Northumberland, and they bonded at 11 at a party where each threw pats of butter and rolls at the birthday boy.

When BBC2 controller Jane Root was looking to commission a series in response to the interest provoked by her plans to modernise One Man And His Dog, she turned to Johnny. He had written to the BBC suggesting Clarissa should front a countryside show; she was already established as a TV natural, uncomplicated, opinionated, informed and uncompromising.

"Jane commissioned us partly because she got all these letters after she axed One Man And His Dog and partly because she had noted that 500,000 people walked through London on the Countryside Alliance march - which no one else did," says Clarissa.

Johnny, the calm alongside the storm that is Clarissa, believed a countryside programme was long overdue. "There's been nothing representative of country life on TV since Jack Hargreaves died in 1972: the Out Of Town series died with him, and there's been no equivalent show since then," he says. "The dearth of countryside programmes is one of the reasons I believe why country life has become so isolated."

Clarissa agrees. "Since the early Seventies, the countryside has been shown on TV as braying idiot toffs or braying idiot yokels with straw in their mouths. You only have poor Emmerdale or that dreadful Monarch Of The Glen!" she says.

Country issues, be they farming, fox hunting or fuel protests, have become a political hot potato, or as Clarissa puts it, "a thing the politicians have picked up to play with".

Johnny, too, believes the country community has been given a lowly status by politicians. "We've been made into an ethnic minority but the ethnic minority is fighting back and taking the nation with it," he says.

These comments may suggest Clarissa and Johnny's principal objective is for the countryside to fight back. Not so. They are angered at Labour's anti-hunting MPs dismissing the Countryside Alliance marchers as "nothing but a rabble", but they are keener to spread understanding and tolerance. Through their TV series and the book, they want to highlight "the unbreakable thread that runs between farming, conservation and field sports".

As the book's dust jacket says, Clarissa And the Countryman is neither an apologia nor an argument; it is a celebration of the countryside. "With the book and the series, we're bringing the countryside alive, which is why One Man And His Dog was so popular. It did take the viewer out into the countryside," says Johnny.

"But the trouble is, as a nation, we've lost touch with our country roots. When I grew up I had a pride in my father and the security of what he did - the hunt; being a JP and a deputy lieutenant - and the countryside was a peaceful and benign place. Yet my children are growing up feeling that the country way of life I've passed on - which after all is a treasure - is somehow wrong."

However, Clarissa can sense a change in the wind. "I sometimes listen to Jimmy Young on the radio, to tune into the voice of the masses, and at the time of Michael Foster's anti-hunting bill, there was talk about 'Toffs getting their rocks off', but this year there have been people ringing up and saying 'You shouldn't stop hunting: it's a freedom issue'," she says. "What has always united people in this country is democracy under threat."