[3] Born in Edmonton, Middlesex, on 31 December 1911, the son of James Arthur and Ada Hargreaves (née Jubb), Jack was christened John Herbert and was one of three brothers.

The family was rooted in Armitage Bridge near Huddersfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where at the time of his marriage in 1907 James Hargreaves was a commercial traveller.

[6] His reputation as a communicator went ahead of him and he was recruited to the staff of General Montgomery to play a role setting up broadcasting services to Allied forces before and after D-Day.

[5] After the war, Hargreaves continued his media career and during the 1950s was editor of Lilliput magazine and Picture Post where he commissioned work from Bert Hardy.

[1] A lover of angling, Hargreaves was bemused at the way it had become tribalised by class and species, which he blamed on "sociological, technical, financial and Malthusian" causes.

Hargreaves' style was complemented in this first book by the drawings of his friend Bernard Venables: "It is one of the most excellent provisions of Nature" he wrote in a chapter for the warmest time of the year "that chub are to be angled for on hot summer afternoons ...

When the grass is high and full of hum and rustle, when the comfrey blooms along the edge of the water and the air shivers in the heat, the chub lie just under the surface in slacks and corners and eddies all along the bank.

This was when he became sceptical about the opinion of the 17th-century author of The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton, as to the culinary qualities of the chub – a dish Hargreaves described as "eating cotton wool full of pins and needles".

[5] He believed that although agriculture would be preferable, military exercises seemed less harmful in their impact on the environment than its use for the recreational choices of a predominantly urban population.

This was a conundrum he shared wryly with his audience, gently repeating the point, that the countryside, insofar as it had a purpose for humans, was to grow their food in sustainable ways.

Instead of the studio 'shed' that had been a mainstay of the earlier series, these episodes were made in Hargreaves's real shed at his last home – Raven Cottage, Belchalwell, Dorset.

In 2004, a full-length edition of Out of Town, first broadcast on 23 May 1980, was included on a DVD released by ITV Meridian to mark the closing of Southern Television's Southampton studios.

The whereabouts of the remaining master tapes was unknown for many years but 34 complete original episodes of Out of Town – broadcast in 1980 and 1981 – eventually came to light, and were made available on DVD.