Kate Humble is wasted as a presenter.She ought to be an old-fashioned matchmaker, pairing off husband-hungry girls with eligible lads and arranging their marriages for a fee.
She certainly threw herself into the search for a dashing dog to mate with her Welsh sheepdog bitch, Teg, on My Sheepdog And Me (BBC2).
But please don’t imagine this was common or garden breeding: Kate compared herself to the mature ladies of a Jane Austen novel, baoly.ru on the lookout for presentable bridegrooms to wed their daughters.
Kate Humble threw herself into the search for a dashing dog to mate with her Welsh sheepdog bitch, Teg, on My Sheepdog And Me (BBC2)
Every mutt she saw came in for careful scrutiny.‘I have to confess I’ve had my eye on Will,’ she mused, as Teg and another dog sniffed around each other. ‘There’s some chemistry going on there.’
Her heart was won, though, by Tango, a dog trained to round up feral sheep that have escaped from flocks into forests.
This was the boyo for her Teg — though the decision might have been influenced by Tango’s owner, who could hoist a ram over his shoulders as if it were a sack of feathers.‘He’s like superman, like a man mountain,’ Kate quivered.
When Kate and her husband, TV producer Ludo, moved from London to a Monmouthshire farm in the early Nineties, they took their middle-class ways with them.
Every decision about the dog was subject to a civilised family debate, which involved complex negotiation and bargaining — with special regard to foreign filming schedules, holiday plans and so on. Muddling through is not this couple’s way.
Teg had one eye that was half-blue, half-brown. ‘She looks like a cross between David Bowie and Basil Brush,’ quipped Kate to a couple of shepherds on a Snowdonia hillside.That drew some blank looks.
And when he brought Teg to be mated, Ludo expended his media small talk on the dog’s owner, in a torrent of elegant chatter and wry asides.
‘She’s going to get Tango’d,’ he commented drily.The farmer answered in monosyllables and eyed him with sidelong suspicion. Witty wordplay might be essential in the TV world, but Welsh country folk expect less talk and more work.
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SEA DOG OF THE NIGHT
Ray Mears spotted a trawler off the Brittany coast in Wild France (ITV), scooping up seaweed with a gigantic spinning billhook.
This device was a Scooby-Doo, claimed Ray.Oh yes — and I suppose the captain was called Shaggy and his boat is the Mystery Machine.
