Thursday 12th
NEW LIVES IN THE UK, C5, 9pm
Ben Fogle, the sun-kissed boy adventurer, previously worked on a series called New Lives In The Wild where he met various people who’d abandoned the rat race and set off for exotic locations to start a new and unfettered existence. But these weren’t middle-class people pottering around in Tuscany; his journeys took him to inhospitable locations like Alaska, Appalachia, French Polynesia – and even Scotland (Rum).
This new series has the same premise, in that he meets people who desperately wanted a change in lifestyle and to throw off the pressures of work and city living, but didn’t want to bother with jabs or passports. Instead, they created drastically new lives for themselves in Britain. How is this done? Are we a big enough island to accommodate extreme shifts in how we live?
He meets the Mason family, who swapped hectic London life for four acres of overgrown land in Devon. Is it a rural paradise or just dirty manual labour? And how did the locals react to their arrival? Surely, part of a wonderful new lifestyle is rubbing along nicely with your companions, but when the Masons arrived – with nothing but a horsebox which they used as a dwelling– they received a hostile welcome with the local council tried to evict them from the land. Hardly paradise. Maybe they’d have been better off in Polynesia after all.
HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN, SKY ARTS, 9pm
In a famous marriage between two great people, often the woman seems to be stricken by some terrible fate – think of Sylvia Plath’s suicide or Vivien Leigh’s manic depression – but here the pattern is reversed.
Ernest Hemingway killed himself whereas his third wife, the fearless war reporter Martha Gellhorn lived a long live full of travel, spirit, wit and adventure. Their story is told here, starring Nicole Kidman as the spiky Martha and Clive Owen as Hemingway.
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