Why I love to Escape to the Country with Jules and team

The clock strikes 3.30pm – I know, in the song it’s 4pm, and everything in my house stops for tea and Escape to the Country, weekdays on BBC One.

The format is simple, the presenters, to a man and woman, are lovely and the scenery – be it crags, hills, fields, canals, cliffs, beaches or burns, is breathtakingly beautiful.

The property-buying/real estate programme has been on the air for 23 years and shows no signs of tiring the viewer.

The show features potential home buyers searching for their dream homes in rural UK areas. The buyers view three or four properties for sale, including a mystery house in their chosen county or region.

The houses they visit can include rentals, new-builds, kit-homes, market town addresses, renovation projects or plots of land with potential for building.

After inspecting each house, the presenter asks the buyers to guess the asking price before revealing it.

At the end of each episode, the buyers are asked to choose their favourite property and discuss their plans for potentially purchasing it.

Escape to the Country is much more than Channel 4’s answer to it: Location, Location, Location or A Place in the Sun.

It is William Cobbet’s Rural Rides come to life, a tour of the UK countryside combined with lessons in history, geography, geology, economics and archeology.

Each episode features countryside imagery, information about the counties, towns, and villages and interviews with local residents of various ages and backgrounds to gather their opinions about the area

Almost since its conception, Escape to the Country has a segment on issues, including sustainable farming and fishing, second homes, affordability of housing stock and the effects of climate change.

It is Through the Keyhole meets Countryfile.

Series 25 is on now – with presenters Sonali Shah, Briony May Williams, Steve Brown, Nicki Chapman, Ginny Buckley, Denise Nurse, Alastair Appleton and Jules Hudson showing potential escapees properties in every region of the UK.

My favourite is Jules – cos he never tires of saying “let’s go down the pub” – which is always a capital suggestion in my book. All of them, though, subscribe to what is a golden rule of broadcasting: it is not about them.

The viewer follows the journey of the couples – be it husband and wife, siblings, lovers and friends – and see their reactions to the properties they are shown – without a filter.

They range from unbridled delight to undisguised scorn, which is always hilarious as the presenter strives to put things in perspective – “You’re right, the kitchen doesn’t have an island the size of Jersey but it does have room for an air fryer.”

That sort of thing, anyway.

Through the decades, fans, of which I count myself an avid one, have been shown country cottages, mansion houses, converted castles and chapels, former schools, barn conversions, bungalows, thatched roofs, exposed beams, flagstone floors, attic bedrooms, Juliette balconies, patios, workshops, granny flats,allotments and paddocks.

We have travelled from Herefordshire to the Hebrides, Devon to Durham and North Yorkshire to Sussex.

We have wallowed in the Shropshire of AE Housman and lingered in Thomas Hardy’s Dorset.

There have been stops in the Cotswolds of MC Beaton’s Agatha Raisin – Jilly Cooper’s countryside is far too wild for me – and visits to Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall.

We have been up hill and down dale to the Highlands, Lowlands and the Black Country, oft times bathed in sunshine and ocassionally deluged.

Escape to the Country plays to aspiration – a dirty word in some quarters but not in my house – and romance, a hankering for a slower pace and a less complicated way of life – growing your own vegetables and getting old.

It taps into a dream of unlimited horizons and self-sufficiency. I have no wish to leave my home by the sea but I do love an Escape to the Country now and again.