One of things that irritates me is the way many townies look down upon country folk. The days are gone, I admit, when in cartoons we sat outside the village pub in smocks, straw in mouth, waiting to con the unsuspecting visitor out of a gill of "zoiderrr", but we are still regarded in some areas as thick, inbred peasants who live high on the hog on farm subsidies wrenched from their hard-earned taxes.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of real life, a point proved by the rush of townsfolk to buy property in areas like Craven at £400,000-plus. But the metropolitan media, and television in particular, continue to portray country folk as near cretins.

There have been many TV series in this mould, but quite the worst, in my opinion, is Jam and Jerusalem, the BBC show based on a mythical Women's Institute full of half-crazy, bitchy and butchy women played by the likes of Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and - sad, this, for an actress of supreme talent - Joanna Lumley.

Whoever wrote this turgid rubbish has a) never visited the countryside, b) never spoken to a genuine country person and c) most definitely never done any serious research on the Women's Institute movement which, over the years, has been one of the most radical and determined pressure groups in the country.

The Keep Britain Tidy campaign was started by the WI back in the 1950s. Its members were fighting for better school meals in the 1960s before Jamie Oliver was born. They scored a major success last autumn by pressing the Office of Fair Trading to investigate the conspiracy by supermarkets to cheat both farmers and customers by fixing milk prices.

And - this will raise a few eyebrows - a WI group in Hampshire is pressing for the legalisation of brothels as a way of halting the trafficking of women as sex slaves from Eastern Europe.

In the words of Margy Stockdale, president of Bolton Abbey WI and vice-chairman of the North West Yorkshire Federation: "The sort of images presented by Jam and Jerusalem irritate me in the extreme.

"They make us look like caricatures, sending out all the old clichés. Most country folk know it is a joke, completely divorced from reality, but my worry is that people in the towns and cities will accept it as the truth."

The WI movement was formed at a time of grave national peril in 1915 when British soldiers were dying in their tens of thousands in desperate battles in France and our food supplies were being threatened by German U-boats in the Atlantic.

It had two clear aims: to encourage women to become more involved in local food production, and to vitalise rural communities at a time when thousands were leaving the land to move into the industrial towns and cities - a movement particularly strong in the North of England.

It is now the biggest women's organisation in the UK, with 211,000 members in 6,800 institutes.

Far from concentrating on baking cakes and flower arranging, it is a major provider of further education for women - and an outspoken supporter of many radical causes. This the former Prime Minister Tony Blair learned to his cost two years ago when he addressed the movement's annual meeting - and was drowned out by a slow handclap shown on television worldwide.

His Government had just banned fox hunting, which the WI - although a long supporter of good animal husbandry in agriculture - looked upon as a totally unwarranted attack on country ways by left-wing townies - "an act of class war against the toffs", as one person described it to me at the time.

There are seasoned political observers who believed that the slow hand clap - and Blair's look of total bafflement - was the beginning of the sharp decline in national popularity which eventually led to his departure from Downing Street.

Despite all this, shows like Jam and Jerusalem continue to portray country folk as incestuous ingrates living on the sweat of townies.

And there have been many more shows in the same vein. I stopped listening to The Archers, the archetypal rural broadcast series, 10 years ago when one of its writers, a former agricultural journalist hired for his specialist knowledge, quit because "it has become a politically correct soap opera with virtually no connection to real rural life".

No wonder women like Burnsall's Margy Stockdale get very cross. She told me: "We never get national publicity for the serious campaigns we support. The fact that a WI called for legalised brothels has been portrayed as a sort of sex story when, in fact, we are trying to protect thousands of trafficked women from a life of abject horror."

Now that's not a funny story. So city slicker TV types will no doubt take the easy way out and continue to make a laughing stock of country life.