Ben Fogle: Make a New Life in the Country Channel 5, 9pm ***

MEET Jade, who used to work in public relations in the City. He was standing outside a hotel in the Highlands that he and his wife Alice had recently purchased. “We sold our flat in London, bought this and still had change,” he said, still looking stunned at the bargain.

The viewer who had just switched over unawares to Channel 5 might have thought they had dropped in on some edgy political piece about the economic disparity between London and Scotland. But no. This was the first in a new series, Ben Fogle: Make a New Life in the Country, and the first stop was “glorious Scotland” as the presenter described it.

“This is one of my favourite places on Earth,” said Fogle. “I’ve often imagined what it would be like to bring my own family here and open a boutique hotel. It’s the Scottish dream.” Not to be confused with the Scottish play, of course.

Fogle has a strong connection with Scotland, having taken part in Castaway 2000, the reality show in which a group of strangers tried to start a new community on Taransay. From this he launched what has turned out to be a successful television career. From Countryfile to Crufts, if there is a gig involving Barbour jackets and stout boots, Fogle has probably bagged it.

Jade and Alice had a starter flat in Croydon, good jobs, two dogs, family and friends nearby, but London life felt like being on a treadmill. Alice, Scottish on her mother’s side, had spent many a holiday in Scotland with her grandparents, so north they came to Loch Tummel, ten miles from Pitlochry.

With no experience running a hotel it was a bold move to buy a six-bedroom inn that had been empty for two years. The price was £236,000, paid for by selling the Croydon flat for £290,000. Although they had builders to do the big tasks, everything else was down to them.

The story that played out was familiar reality show fare, with the couple going from initial excitement to exhaustion as reality set in. The first night’s restaurant takings were £391.41. “On balance it is a ****load of work for what on the surface looks like not a lot of gain,” said Alice.

There were the obligatory fraught moments, particularly when Jade tried to give his team of two, Alice and Callum their friend from London, a pep talk which consisted of cliches (“We only have one shot at this”) and portents of doom. “The worst pep talk in pep talk history,” concluded Alice.

Daughter of an Army officer, Alice was a practical, get-stuck-in sort. The production had sneaky ways of hinting her family were not short of a bob, as when they filmed her putting up paintings that she had borrowed from her parents’ home, as one does.

There was a major flaw in the format in that the programme began in 2019, with Fogle’s visit, then looped back to 2016 when the couple first bought the place.

Since we knew from the off that they were still in business there was no sense of jeopardy. Moreover, since one assumes the film crew were not with them for every minute of the three years, there would have been moments that were missed. As Alice’s mum said, there had been “lots of tears”.

Their biggest problem was attracting staff due to the remoteness of the location. Eight chefs came and went in three years before Alice decided to do the catering herself. You had to hand it to the pair; they stuck at it. It had been tough but worth it, and they would not be going back to London.

Fogle almost put his finger on it when he said that a beautiful landscape and spectacular views were probably not enough on their own to make a success of a hotel. For probably read definitely.