"Director: Zam Baring"

• River Cottage Collection | DVD | (10/09/2007) from £22.99   |  Saving you £17.00 (73.95%)   |  RRP £39.99

  Escape To River Cottage: It is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's dream to escape the urban sprawl and find a little place in the country where he can live off the fat of the land. When Hugh finds River Cottage nestling in the heart of the beautiful Dorset countryside he sets about turning his dream into a reality. The first casualty to self-sufficiency is the flower bed which makes way for terracing to grow edible crops. Once the vegetables have been taken care of Hugh sets off in his 1965 Ford Corsair in search of livestock. The first arrivals at the cottage are a pair of eight week old Gloucester Old Spot pigs but more animals soon follow. Hugh also finds time to show how sumptuous meals can be prepared from the local produce be it sea fish pigeons or freshly caught pike. Return To River Cottage: The second series looking at the life of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who continues to live in River Cottage in Dorset. River Cottage Forever: The rolling hills and rugged countryside of Dorset provide the perfect backdrop for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's experiment to leave the rat race behind to live off the fat of the land. Tucked away at the bottom of one of the county's valleys he finds his ideal home: River Cottage. In his first year Hugh had just the cottage and the garden but he soon found he needed more land so in his second year he did a deal with a neighbour to rent four acres. His smallholding now boasts a polytunnel for growing vegetables fox proof high rise chicken accommodation and pasture for his sheep cows and pigs. It is now the start of his third year and as well as being a time for looking back with joy and satisfaction at the events of the last two years it is a time to ask the really big question: should Hugh stay at River Cottage forever?

• Escape To River Cottage | DVD | (06/09/2003) from £6.25   |  Saving you £18.74 (299.84%)   |  RRP £24.99

  It's easy to be cynical about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's adventures as a downshifted smallholder in Escape to River Cottage; after all, given his fame and fortune, he could upshift again faster than a BMW sports gearbox whenever he chose. "Why don't you give it a go?", he asks us. Because we don't all have fat media contracts to fall back on, we roll our eyes and reply. However, despite HF-W's seeming like a Posy Simmonds character, the fact remains that no TV chef has come close when it comes to reminding the supermarket generation about where food really comes from, or indeed where it should come from, as well as the values of indigenous produce (also a largely overlooked aspect of macrobiotics, incidentally). In this well-stuffed double DVD set Weirdly-Eatingall does alarming things with a goose, smokes fish in his chimney, eats his rather cute pigs, monitors the movements of mice by marking them with lipstick (why does he just happen to have some lippy lying around?) and, almost in passing, cooks up some wonderful dishes with his home-grown ingredients. On the DVD: Escape to River Cottage two-disc set includes six episodes, plus a bonus in the form of the Christmas special. Extras are on-screen recipes, F-W's biography and some outtakes, which are deeply unfunny except when various things decide to bite the presenter, which they do fairly often. The extras are duplicated on both discs, which is pointless and/or a bit of a swizz. --Roger Thomas

• Return To River Cottage | DVD | (19/04/2004) from £8.00   |  Saving you £16.99 (68.00%)   |  RRP £24.99

  The second series looking at the life of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who continues to live in River Cottage in Dorset.