Pitched as a new factual entertainment series on Five. The Farm saw 9 celebrities living together on a farm with no running water, electricity, modern toilet facilities or mobile phones for a month. Living in isolation, they must grow their own food, collect firewood and tend farmyard animals.

Five hoped that the series would educate a wide audience on how the food they eat arrives on their plates while also providing entertainment showing how metropolitan celebrities immerse themselves in the realities of rural life and how they cope with that. The series certainly delivered on the entertainment front with major magazines for the fist time acknowledging a Five show as well as for the first time in the channel's seven and a half year history one of it's shows made the front page of a national tabloid newspaper when Rebecca Loos was seen masturbating a pig!

Before The Farm, Five didn't have a very good history with reality shows, with its only major attempt (Back To Reality - 2004) a failure.

The show first ran in Norway back in 2001 and is produced by Endemol who produce the popular Big Brother (UK) and The Salon series for Channel 4 and Fame Academy for the BBC.

Four months after the end of the successful first series (which attracted over 2 million viewers), Five announced that they were planning a second series of the show with a new group of celebs. This second series aired 18 episodes from the 9th of May 2005 and featured 10 celebrities living in slightly more luxurious accommodation that the last bunch. The series was moved to a 10.30pm time slot (from the 10pm slot it was in for the previous series). As a result of this and Five's attempt to make the show more outrageous by introducing two porn stars in the mix, the series attracted slightly fewer viewers than the first series but still attracted good numbers for the channel.

It remains unclear as to whether or not there will be a third series of The Farm