Fishing in the Footsteps of Mr. Crabtree

Fishing in the Footsteps of Mr. Crabtree is a television series on Quest, first airing in January 2013. It is based on the 1940s comic strip Mr. Crabtree goes Fishing, by Bernard Venables.

Background
Mr. Crabtree Goes Fishing, created by Bernard Venables, was originally published in The Mirror newspaper in the 1940s. It is the comic strip story of a father who takes his son Peter on a series of angling adventures over the course of a year catching species such as chub, pike, carp, roach, tench and trout, on rivers and lakes. In 1949 the first Mr. Crabtree book was published. Mr. Crabtree Goes Fishing has sold around four million copies to date.

Bernard Venables was an artist, angler, journalist and author. He co-founded the Angling Times in 1953, was founder editor of Creel magazine in 1963, and wrote over 20 books. He was an early environmentalist and his love of the natural world inspired many of today's British anglers, and he is remembered as one of the great and influential anglers of the 20th Century.

TV series
In 2013 ‘Fishing in the Footsteps of Mr. Crabtree’, the TV series, was produced by Toast Entertainment Group for Mr. Crabtree Ltd. It was aired in the UK on Quest during January and February 2013.

This first series saw presenter John Bailey, an internationally renowned fishing guide, fishing and walking in the footsteps of his angling hero, Mr. Crabtree, taking a different young guest fishing each week.