It's a pig of a job for Jimmy

Jimmy's Farm (BBC2)

The British UFO Files (five)

WHEN would-be pig farmer Jimmy Docherty said that the farmhouse "needs a bit of work", he was understating the case. It was derelict. Other drawbacks of the 90-acre farm in Ipswich included no running water or electricity.

Essex boy Jimmy, 28, spent six years studying insects at university which doesn't seem like much of a qualification for rearing rare pigs and turning them into sausages.

Nonetheless, he reckoned that in three months the farm would be paying - with a little help from his school friend, chef Jamie Oliver, who put money into the project.

As you can tell, Jimmy's Farm follows the tried and tested formula for reality serials. Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. The adventure comes perilously close to failure. How else would they justify spreading the story over four weeks.

"It's going to be more work than I thought," said the personable Jimmy in another understatement. It's also going to be like a lot of other series in which people embark on new lives or businesses for which they are ill-equipped and prepared.

Jimmy's Farm is entertaining enough, with an out-of-control fire providing a spectacular finale to the first episode, but we've seen it all before.

A man from the Ministry of Defence kept popping up in The British UFO Files, presumably to lend an air of authenticity to all the speculation and conjecture within the British X-Files.

It was all based on government files and eyewitness accounts of unexplained events in the skies over Britain in the last 60 years. I can't say I was any more convinced about flying saucers by the end than I was at the start. I'm with the wonderfully-titled Flying Saucer Working Party that concluded it could all be explained by mistaken identification - or someone having one too many at the pub and seeing aliens landing on the way home.

Difficult to dismiss were eyewitness accounts by air force pilots like Michael Swinney. On a training flight in 1952 he was "rather horrified" to see three circular white objects framed in the front windscreen of his plane. His pupil David Crofts, a Royal Navy lieutenant, verified the sighting and, on the ground, flight control plotted the course of three mysterious objects on the radar.

"I have to admit that I was somewhat scared by what I was witnessing," said Swinney, displaying the same mastery of understatement as pig farmer Jimmy.

Many similar incidents were recorded and logged at UFO HQ - Room 801 at the old Metropolitan Hotel in London. One of the most alarming involved an American air force commander in 1980. Security men chased a UFO through the woods. There were stories of a strange smell and a red light that looked like a winking eye until it exploded and broke into small objects before disappearing.

The MoD seemed to have mislaid the memorandum about the incident, blaming "not conspiracy, but bureaucracy". The fact remains that either a UFO landed or the top-ranking commander of a nuclear airbase and several of his men were hallucinating.