Britain, as Benjamin Disraeli observed, is not one but two nations. Some enjoy long lives and the freedom of the countryside; others live rammed together in appalling factories and die young. The theory applies equally to people and poultry. The lucky ones have hyphens in their names: Fearnley-Whittingstall, Free-Range. The less fortunate make do without. They might respond to “Hailey” or “chicken”. As in “two for a fiver”.

It was a mark of the self-consciously high standards of Hugh’s Chicken Run (Channel 4), that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the former River Cottage dweller, bothered to meet Hailey, even if he did not reveal to us her surname. The Old Etonian lives in the pastoral fat lands of Dorset, the single mother on the wrong side of Axminster, Devon, in the Millwey estate, where to spend £6 on a better-bred chicken counts as profligacy. “This is real life,” admitted F-W as he drove to where he had never driven before to share with the locals his contention that Tesco’s bargain chickens were bad news for the chickens and not necessarily great news for Millwey’s tastebuds either.

Initially, Millwey seemed unlikely to care. We saw one of its residents prepare his £2.50 chicken in the traditional way: hack it to bits, shovel it on to a plate, cover dish with dissolved Oxo cube. And this was one of Millwey’s better meals. In the Axminster Power Tools canteen, the speciality is microwave-ready frozen cheese omelette. Because he once cooked human placenta, Hugh is sometimes known as Hugh Fearnley-Eats-It-All. He wouldn’t eat that. Hailey was not, however, going to have her buying habits patronised and fired both barrels at Hugh’s double-barrels. “What,” she demanded, “should we call you? Hugh or Mr Fearnley-Whateveritis?” By the end of last night’s opener, it was the standard Beatrice-Benedick deal: Hailey had become Hugh’s No 1 breeder down at the Millwey allotments’ picturesque new chicken run.

But we know what happy chickens look like because we have seen River Cottage. What we needed to see was a shed of intensively bred chickens. The reason we couldn’t was that not a single chicken farmer was prepared to let him in, just as no supermarket chief executive would meet him. Having already shocked shoppers outside the Tesco store in Axminster by cramming 17 (plastic) chickens in the legally prescribed square metre, F-W could have left matters to our imaginations but in a brilliant journalistic coup, he built his own factory farm. In one half 2,500 chickens would live for 39 days, with 30 minutes’ shut-eye every 24 hours. On the other side would be just the 1,500 broilers, amusingly known as free-range.

“In my world sick animals are seen by a vet,” F-W said as he patrolled his grim new coup in a biosecurity suit. He was looking for weaklings. Their necks would be broken against a metal beam, their still fluttering torsos consigned to a black sack. The experiment, F-W confessed, was unsettling him. It unsettled me too, as it deserved to. I had an Asda chicken in the oven. A preview for tonight’s episode shows F-W in tears: “I really don’t want to kill another bird this morning.” If this programme, part of C4’s Big Food Fight strand, takes flight, it might have more effect on both nations’ eating habits than even Jamie’s School Dinners. H F-W is no sentimentalist, however, and he warned one of Hailey’s brood of chicken breeders not to create a pet out of a chicken she had developed a tendresse for by giving it a name.

Different rules apply, apparently in Nairobi to elephants – when they are not being shot for their ivory. In the nauseating Elephant Diaries (BBC One), a moustachioed white man called Jonathan and his pert co-pre-senter Michaela Strachan take an unhealthy interest in the orphaned elephants (or “ellies”) rescued by a Kenyan charity. The ellies’ names include Emily and Wendy. Jonathan and Michaela don’t do much of practical use, but are specialists in ellie-epathy, mind-reading and idle conjecture. Their analyses last night included: “It is almost as if they have come to pay their respects” and “It is thought she saw her mother being killed by poachers”. The episode ended with Daphne, the colonial in charge of the charity, weeping over a baby elephant that was losing its sight. Bring on the giant specs! Good on BBC One for going ahead with this one, even as Kenya burns.

Out of the box

Phew! The final series of the amazing American drama The Wire, shown here on FX, was completed before the writers’ strike. The previous season was about Baltimore’s failing schools. This is located in the cash-strapped Baltimore Sun. Like everything on The Wire, things are connected. In the new season a veteran hack corrects a young reporter’s prose. “To evacuate a person,” he explains, “is to give that person an enema.” Is Five Newsreally to be renamed Five News with Natashawhen Natasha Kaplinsky takes over as presenter next month? The plan is certainly to build the bulletins around her, combining the “glamorous, Children in Need red carpet diva” with the serious co-presenter of the BBC News. Five wants the show to feel “daytime” – although, I am promised, stories such as Kenya will not be ignored.

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