There was some terrible TV last year. Channel 4 gave us ‘What’s cooking? From the Sainsbury’s Kitchen’, where Ben Shepherd and Lisa Faulkner plugged Sainsbury’s food for a full 13 weeks.

Sky offered up a turgid documentary about Greggs on Sky that proved working at Greggs isn’t as exciting as you might think (the first episode peaked when the new coffee machine broke. A man came to fix it. He got it working in no time).Then there was the Mary Portas show, which saw the retail guru accused of humiliating the very towns she was supposed to help.

Topping the lot, however, this was the most stupefying TV show of all time: Tudor Monastery Farm. It lasted for six hour-long episodes. Each one was narrated by the fabulous Geraldine James, who had apparently come straight from doing a voiceover about the holocaust and was stuck in “dead-serious” mode. Or maybe she had been told to narrate another five. I can think of at least 60 minutes I would have cut from the first episode.

As it drew to a close I slapped myself awake when a sturdy brown cow, pulling a hopelessly ineffective wooden plough, started going faster. I sat up as the camera wobbled in true cinéma vérité style. “Whoa,” called the farmer. And the cow slowed down. If you are a desperate insomniac then fire up the iPlayer and get yourself comfortable, because tonight you will sleep! But be warned: at six hours long it may still be on when you wake up.

Read The Grocer’s Review of the Year 2013.