One of the best TV documentaries I saw last year was The Lie of the Land, directed by Molly Dineen. It was repeated on More4 last night and it made me shudder just as much as on a first viewing.

Becca blogged about it prior to its first screening last year and the doc then provoked quite a response, not just on our blog and C4's forums, but all over the UK, in and out of farming communities. Molly tends to split opinion, and this documentary was no different - some felt she'd uncovered a topic no one else was touching (the neglect of British  farming by everyone in Government, but also all of us who eat food), some felt she has misplaced sympathy for an imagined bucolic lifestyle she didn't fully understand.

I very much felt the former - the doc was a total indictment of our complicity in the slow death of British farming - and give it a few decades, and death won't be an exaggeration. Dineen tied in the localised suffering of individual farmers with our activities as consumers, buying imported produce from supermarkets whose priority is never to be fair to small agricultural suppliers.

In its way, it was as much a call-to-arms as Jamie's School Dinners or the new Hugh's Chicken Run . But somehow, it doesn't seem to be having the same policy impact, despite being just as clear in stating what's wrong and what needs doing. I love to see a quality campaigning doc having an impact on social policy like Jamie's series did, and there's an amazing heritage of films which have done just that and I believe it's essential to docs' continuing relevance to the wider world.

But the aftermath of Lie of The Land, despite a lot of chatter being generated, shows that the ability for a doc to have an impact isn't as straightforward as whether it was good, accessible, or got its point across well. It's also about who it concerns and who watches it - and this was a doc about rural England as opposed to urban, and it was promoted as being relatively high-brow and hard-hitting, not a tabolid-friendly mini-series.

So in a sense, it's made no difference at all, which makes me really sad.