Reality TV not to your taste? Try cheddarvision
It is a restful, undemanding sort of reality TV. Tune in and you are greeted with an image of a round of cheddar cheese, sitting on a shelf at a Somerset farm beside a clock ticking off the days, hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. Then you simply sit back and watch as the cheese matures. At the moment it has a soft white cloak of mould. When it reaches full ripeness, in nine months time, it will be more of an old gravestone grey.
Celebrity Big Brother or The Apprentice it is not, but this subtler sort of reality TV has already attracted the best part of half a million "hits". And this morning as many as 50,000 cheddar aficionados are expected to be glued to their computer screens for a highlight, when the webcam focused on the cheese beams live pictures of its first quality test, as the cheese is prodded, sniffed and nibbled at.
The cheddarvision.tv website is the brainchild of West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers and their PR people - who also brought the world the idea that cows from Somerset moo in a West Country accent, an unlikely tale that captured the imagination of the UK last summer.
The cheddarvision site has proved even more popular. A company spokesman, Dom Lane, said: "It has really taken off. We've had people logging on from New Zealand to Iceland. This site shows the entire process of what goes into making a good cheddar. "
The cheese also has its own myspace site, where it has almost 500 friends.
Thus far the highlight of the cheese's week has tended to be Monday mornings, when it is turned over. But today's highlight is expected to break all records. It will feature the expert cheesemaker Tom Calver pulling out a core of the cheese, then sniffing and tasting it to check if it is maturing properly.
The test will also give a clue as to how it might taste at the end of the project, when it will be auctioned off for charity.
guardian
