Looks like it’s Amish season again. Sure as the kohlrabi fattens every summer and the cattle ripen on the vine, there comes a time every few years when the television schedules fill with tales of ordinary people eager to throw off the yoke of late western capitalism and try to find deeper fulfilment by disturbing the nearest peaceful Anabaptist sect and refusing to adapt to its ways. In the past we have had Living with the Amish (and various similar titles), How to Get to Heaven With the Hutterites and affiliated documentaries such as Inside the Bruderhof, all set up to show us the error of our overstuffed, consumerist ways.
Welcome, this time, to The Simpler Life (Channel 4). Here, 24 Britons from young to middle age are taken off to Devon to live for six months on a 16-hectare farm under the rule of Ohioans Edna and Lloyd Miller, without mains electricity or gas, without food beyond that which they grow themselves – or find in the store cupboard – and without any control over what happens to them in the edit.
