Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild UK, TV review - 'Oh, to run away from it all and live in a mud hut with goats'

What's your idea of a bit of home improvement? Maybe some stylish tiling for the bathroom. Or that fitted kitchen you've always promised yourselves?

For Emma Orbach it seems to be kneading house manure into the straw that forms the walls of your dwelling, with, as Ben Fogle, who gamely joins in this novel exercise in construction, “the distinct smell of horse” adding to the authenticity of what appears to be closest thing you can get to a pre-Roman lifestyle in Cameron's Britain. “Lovely isn't it,” Orbach asks Fogle, but even this hardy outdoorsman couldn't quite bring himself to agree with that particular sentiment.

For Orbach is another soul that Fogle has discovered who wants to leave the rat race behind and find a new, non-materialistic brand of happiness. So she decided to leave her conventional home and family and live in a mud hut in the Welsh wilderness. She was a remarkable find – in her own words, “electricity makes me feel weird” and “microwaves are not good for the earth”.

She does have a landline, though, but of course her phonebox is made out of grass mud and, yes, you guessed, horse shit. I'm not sure I agree with Fogle that her design beats one of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's classics. Maybe he was humouring her.

To be fair to Fogle, this wasn't just some “hey look at the strange hippy” exploitation. He did let Orbach speak for herself and told us about her back story, and her “epiphany”. This took place on a full moon, it has to be said, and involved a great big motorway being built next to her then family home, a charming house in Wiltshire, where she and her husband raised their family and virtually rebuilt (without the help of dung). At that stage she was your standard sort of earth mother with a taste for natural fibres and the folk guitar; it seems to have been the noisy intrusion by the M4 that turned into a full-on Celtic Iron Age maiden. After a spell in an intermediate stage of low technology – slightly run-down Welsh farmhouse on 175 acres of land, Emma eventually just went Hobbit, at the cost of her marriage. There was a sadness in this that was lest left unexplored, and I was pleased my prurient curiosity about the break-up of that family was left unsated.

Impressively, Orbach speaks “goat”, which is probably trickier than picking up Welsh, so she can gather in the livestock she keeps to provide her with some milk. Her goats like her, and so do I, having sort-of met her now. Lots of us whinge about the “living hell” of our jobs and commutes, but do sod-all about it. Here is someone who has, for whatever reason, decided that she wants out of our way of life, and is making real sacrifices to do so. Not so weird, maybe.

I would imagine that if Orbach were ever offered a Cheesy Wotsit she would retch, and Dr Rangan Chatterjee's reaction to the tasty corn-based snack was scarcely more favourable. In the BBC's Doctor in the House, he found the contraband in the kitchen of the Mistry family who had, as part of an entertaining TV experiment, invited him to live with them for a week. Being extremely civilised people suffering mostly from the usual “first world” diseases of Type II diabetes and stress, I did wonder if they might all be better off living off the goat's milk, nuts and fruits of the forest in Orbach's home in Pembrokeshire, and bathing in the limpid icy waters of the stream running past her hut. I am tempted, I must say.