Yorkshire Farm’s Reuben is an example to all youngsters
Believe everything you read, and today’s school leavers are incapable of holding down a job, preoccupied with their mental health, and lacking basic life skills. As a cheerful corrective to this you can watch Reuben: Life in the Dales (Channel 5), in which 20-year-old Reuben Owen runs his own groundwork and plant hire business, helped by two friends.
How has this young man landed his own fly-on-the-wall series? Well, it’s because his mother is Amanda Owen, aka The Yorkshire Shepherdess, and cameras documented the family’s way of life in the Dales for years on Our Yorkshire Farm. Now that Amanda and her husband Clive have separated, that show is no more, and Channel 5 has diversified with this spin-off.
Reuben seems like a nice lad with his head screwed on. He learned to operate machinery at a young age, so handles everything with quiet confidence. His colleagues are Tommy and Sarah – the latter is Reuben’s girlfriend, according to his Instagram account, because even farmers have Instagram accounts – and none of them is afraid of hard work. They drive diggers and bulldozers and tracked dumpers in all weathers. For fun, they drive vintage tractors.
It’s wholesome entertainment and the countryside is lovely to look at. Not very much happens, though. The trio dig the pond. They communicate via walkie talkies about how best to dig the pond.
At one point they clean debris out of a pipe. For a change of scenery, they go to a digger demonstration in Peterborough and Reuben takes part in a competition that involves shooting basketballs through hoops using a digger. None of this is exciting.
Sometimes the conversations between the friends have a stilted feel, as if the director has instructed them to sit down and talk about particular subjects. When they’re allowed to chat freely, it’s much better, as when they try to work out how many days it will take them to shift 6,000 tons of silt. “If I was good at maths, I’d have a job in an office,” muses Reuben. “If I was good at maths, I wouldn’t be here,” says Tommy. “If I was good at anything other than driving a digger, I wouldn’t be here,” Reuben says, deadpan.
Our Yorkshire Farm was a hit because it combined insights into rural life with the happy chaos of the Owens raising their nine children. This new series only delivers on the first element. But at least it’s putting young people on TV who don’t aspire to be Love Island contestants.
Everyone on Instagram is a con artist to some degree. All those curated images selling the lie of a perfect lifestyle. Sitting in a pizza restaurant in Rome recently, I watched a succession of women posing outside, smartphones held aloft to capture them at just the right angle, adopting an expression of happiness until the camera clicked. Then they would drop the smile as they fretted over the shots, and do retakes. It looked so miserable. Why this spot? Well, there was an Insta-friendly wall of wisteria. And the restaurant is apparently a favourite of Gwyneth Paltrow’s, if you believe that Gwyneth Paltrow eats pizza.
Instagram’s Worst Con Artist (ITV1), though, took the artifice to a new level. Gob-smacking levels of fraud, in fact. Belle Gibson was an Australian blogger who claimed that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. A doctor had given her weeks to live, she said. And yet here she was several years later, the picture of health, claiming that a diet of “wellness” had prolonged her life after she rejected medical treatment. Sign up to the app, buy the cookbook, and you too could reap these results.
Gibson amassed a huge number of followers, many of them living with cancer and desperate for hope. Corporations saw dollar signs: there were deals with Penguin and with Apple, the latter flying Gibson out to California and selecting her app, The Whole Pantry, for inclusion on the Apple Watch. But everything was a lie and it all unravelled in 2015, when journalists investigated the story.
Why a documentary nine years on? Well, it’s a chance to get stuck into a story of astonishing brazenness.
Contributors include the reporters who investigated Gibson, former friends and estranged family members. The pièce de résistance, though, is a riveting interview conducted in 2015 – only extracts included here – in which Australian presenter Tara Brown takes Gibson apart. But neither that interview, nor this two-parter, explains Gibson’s motivation. Is she a sociopath, a cold-hearted con artist, mentally unwell? Or all three? I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
Reuben: Life in the Dales ★★★ Instagram’s Worst Con Artist ★★★