While I was dressing yesterday morning, there was a debate on the radio about chicken. About whether these programmes featuring high-profile celebrity chefs are a good thing or not. About whether free-range and organic chicken is just a fashionable cause or a righteous one, and about whether families on low incomes could afford these pricier birds. It's just goes to show that Channel 4's Big Food Fight season, which started with Hugh's Chicken Run, had sparked something off in the national consciousness (people, after all get very defensive when they're told what to eat and why). Some listeners were apoplectic with rage – how dare these fancy-Dan celebrity chefs come along and tell us what to eat! It's alright for them, earning loads of money, but what about us? I'll stick to cheaper birds, thank you very bloody much. Phooh! All this over chicken.

I admire Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall (HFW) because he's passionate, he makes great TV shows and he knows how to cook. Anyone who has watched his excellent River Cottage series will know that healthy rearing of animals and stress-free kills are something he's been campaigning for all his working life. As a vegetarian I couldn't care less about chicken (at least not the eating of it), but what I do care about is the quality of a TV programme, and I was interested to see whether Channel 4's sloganeering over the past few weeks actually amounted to a decent, informative and entertaining TV show.

This would be interesting, that much was obvious. Here was HFW, taking himself away from his carefully-constructed, beautiful and very cosy River Cottage environment and thrusting himself into a world of intense and ruthless business, and in among people who couldn't afford chickens that were twice the price of bargain birds from the local supermarket.

His mission was to convert his local town – Axminster in Devon – to free range chicken. The whole town. This was going to be tough. Interviewing random people in the street it was clear that the local Tesco's was everyone's preferred shopping establishment of choice. There, he found some amazing deals – two chickens for a fiver. He was not impressed.

In a bid to engage the supermarkets in a dialogue, he wrote to them all inviting them down to River Cottage for a chat. None of them responded. He then asked intensive chicken farmers if he could come along and observe them. They told him to bugger off.

Things weren't going well, so he decided to create his own battery farm to show exactly what intensely-bred chickens go through. Some of the information was shocking – 17 birds were squashed into one square meter, while a chicken's life – from egg to supermarket – was about 39 days. No room to move, to air to breath, they were bred for one purpose and one purpose only.

Not content with building his own battery farm, he decided to engage the local estate (populated by the very people who couldn't afford free range chickens) in a spot of hands-on chicken rearing. He called a meeting and asked a wide range of people if they would be up for converting a neglected patch of allotment into a chicken run, and looking after their own chickens. They were all up for it and relished doing something communtity-based. This was my favourite part of the show – people who barely spoke to each other on a daily basis were brought together and enjoyed turning their own piece of allotment into something of their own. Whether it would change their eating habits remains to be seen (one very cool single mother rightly said on camera: "I'd like Hugh to live on a single mum's wage and see if he can afford free range chickens").

HFW, in a spot of Jamie's School Dinners-style action, took over the kitchen of the local Axminster tools factory and transformed their canteen menu into something edible and free-range chickeney.

And so it continued, switching between allotment, his own battery farm and the factory. HFW was obviously passionate about this subject, and you couldn't help wonder if he had taken on more than he could chew, such was enormity of his task. But, as ever with HFW, his boyish charm and enthusiasm carried the whole thing along.

The big question, of course, is whether this is just another celebrity crusade – very worthy, but impractical. I expected this to be a preachy, bordering on pompous, documentary, but I was pleasantly surprised. HFW was relaxed, didn't make anyone do anything they didn't want to do and by the end of it Hugh's Chicken Run became an enjoyable, sometimes-shocking (wasn't that the point?) and even heartwarming doc. Part two tommorow night.