THE more time I spend in the countryside, the more extreme seems the contrast with the town.

This is not a gripe about the town – which I love. In fact you’re reading a bloke who can wax all romantic about Leeds: the arcades, Briggate, Corn Exchange, Whitelocks pub, the Victorian town hall with its stone lions and the bare-breasted nymphs in City Square.

If I digress further, there’s an amusing tale to be told about these ladies. Throughout my boyhood, the worshipful authorities on the Corporation of Leeds alternated between admiration and detestation of these statues: the relaxed aldermen allowed the girls to remain in their places, overlooked by the freethinking guardianship of the Unitarian Mill Hill Chapel; but the uptight dignitaries removed them into cold storage. I don’t think there was any political motive, just the old tussle between the opposing views of “the authorities know best” and “live and let live”.

Being notoriously slow on the uptake, I first noticed the great differences between town and country soon after my arriving for a stint as a parson in the City of London. One day I travelled back up to Yorkshire to take my mother out for lunch. We drove to a serene pub on a back road between Ilkley and Skipton in Wharfedale. Waiting for my Cumberland sausage in Yorkshire pud with onion gravy, I took to staring out over the green and pleasant land and felt mightily at peace.

I reckon my mother thought I’d dozed off.

Then I understood the causes of my relaxed mood: beyond that window nothing moved and there was nothing with any writing on.

Towns are wonderful places. I like the concert halls, the galleries – so long as they’re not displaying art with a capital “F” – the public buildings, the choice of restaurants, the ancient churches and the not quite respectable bars.

Sadly, the nymphs have departed.

But towns are, as they say, very much in yer face. The incessant noise, the muck, the press of the people, the gadgeteered comedy which sees everyone on a mobile phone; and the fact that everywhere you look everything has writing on – usually an advert.

All this is fine. When you weary of it you can retire to your sitting room and put on a record of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – what an organist friend of mine used to refer to as “a townsman’s view of the country”.

Yes, I love the town. But what I find offensive is the way in which the metropolitanchic types, who produce everything that comes on the telly, superimpose the noisy aspects of the town on to country pursuits.

Take the delightful programme Countryfile or the enchanting series in which the agile Julia Bradbury takes us walking though the mystical Lake District. Magnificent – except they have to spoil the rural serenity with bursts of pop music.

I’m not intolerant and I’ve long got used to football results with a disco beat and the cricket highlights served with a rock band.

But I draw the line when the glorious David Attenborough takes us into the white deserts of the Antarctic or the limitless ocean depths and we find pop music even there.

Why do they do it?

Are they afraid of silence? Do they get withdrawal symptoms if they have to go ten minutes without noise? Why are they so tasteless as to look upon the wild countryside and yet refuse to let it be?

“God made the country, man made the town,” wrote William Cowper in 1785. Unfair, partisan? Agreed. But he had a point.