As a footballer, Vinnie Jones hailed from the Cretaceous era. A lunging, gurning, clumping choposaurus, he transferred his rep for panto-villain enforcement to Hollywood. If that’s the Vinnie you were brought up on, you’re in for a big surprise with Vinnie Jones in the Country (Discovery+).
We first meet him in the bluebell woods, eyes bright as like a Watford Messiaen he harkens to the sweet chirrups of chaffinch and robin. “Not one of these birds or animals asked me for a selfie,” he says with that raptor’s grin. Instead, they and other fauna are supporting players in the bucolic dream that is Jones’s life as a cloth-capped Sussex squire. “Welcome,” he says, “to the Vinnie Jones countryside s–t show.”
The idea of the series is to tell of a farmhouse’s restoration. His other task is to encourage local wildlife. Does he know much about conservation? “Not really,” he admits disarmingly, as his plan to reintroduce hedgehogs is thwarted by all the badgers on his acres.
Along the way, he provides employment for any number of diamond geezer cockney builders. You won’t hear a single loamy Sussex accent in this show. Chief sidekick is Paul Worby, aka Wobbly aka Wobs. Also cloth-capped, he and Jones are on a joint mission to parade Anglo-Saxon roots by turning the air deepest darkest blue. They’re the two smoking barrels of countryside makeover reality TV, and are highly entertaining too.
The debt owed to Clarkson’s Farm goes without saying: the bantering cast of characters, the choppy editing, the performative squabbles. The unwanted difference is that four years ago Jones was widowed when Tanya, his wife of 25 years, died of cancer. The sight of him piling two pillows in the lonely middle of the bed is deeply poignant.
“Staying busy is my therapy,” he says as he lays out a memorial garden complete with a plinth-mounted old stone bird bath. It’s installed by blokes who speak in the property’s lingua franca. Or they do until the lord of the manor ticks them off. “Can you stop swearing in the garden?”
