Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: the video is live!

Today I made a video (or a “music clip”, as the Australians would have it) for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the second song I have written for the 50/90 Challenge. Shot entirely on location in rural Oxfordshire, it features several different fields, some sheep and even some lavender. Check it out:

I was going to include a load of explanatory photos to add to the comedy effect but I couldn’t bring myself to detract from the pure rural beauty of the raw footage, so I’ll explain here. Firstly, for those of you who don’t know who Hugh is:

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (born 14 January 1965) is a British celebrity chef, television presenter and “real food” campaigner, known for his back-to-basics philosophy.

On television, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s reputation is that of a eccentric chef. Initial exposure came in Cook on the Wild Side, an exploration of earthy cuisine. His habit of “picking up roadkill and eating the hedgerows [...] earned him his nickname of Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall”. He followed this with the series TV Dinners, during an episode of which he notoriously flambéed and puréed a human placenta which was served as a pâté and “much enjoyed by the baby’s family and friends”.

from Wikipedia

I was introduced to Hugh by my friend Rowan, who recently appeared out of the blue on the Channel 4 reality holiday show Shipwrecked. Back when we were in a band together, Rowan used to bring bags of videos to the studio and make us all watch alternating episodes of River Cottage and Ultimate Wrestling, in which fighters from every discipline would be pitched against each other in a battle to the death. Or so it seemed. Lucky for me, I repressed all memories of Ultimate Wrestling until recently and instead concentrated on the rural, organic idealism of the Hugh.

There’s a line in the song that says “he grows PSB in the shade of a tree”. If you haven’t tried locally grown Purple Sprouting Broccoli, you haven’t lived:

I also mention that Hugh can tell his woodcock from his snipe. Can you?:

And while we’re at it, to pass the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall chicken test, can you tell the difference between battery farmed and free range chicken?:

That’s probably enough quasi-educational rambling for now. I hope you enjoyed the song and the video. And if you happen to run into Hugh in your local Tesco car park, be sure to tell him about it…

[thanks Flickr for the Creative Commons licensed photos. Click the images for originals.]

Tagged with: hugh fearnley-whittingstall, songwriting, video

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