Any of you who follow Mortimer and Whitehouse as they go fishing on BBC2 (new series soon by the way) will know that the former bids his captures adieu with the iconic words "and away”.

Those who are readers will know too that Bob’s chart-topping autobiography is also entitled And Away, so you could say that this is one of the buzz phrases of our immediate times. So it should be. There’s much more to these two little words than a frivolous catchphrase... though I’m sure camera man Toby hears them in his nightmares.

When filming Gone Fishing, trying to get a loving panning shot of whatever Bob and Paul catch is nigh on impossible. The moment Toby has wriggled himself into position, then one or the other of them slips the fish back and all the camera gets is a flick of a tail saying goodbye.

Me? As fishing consultant in the series I’m a small cog, but I’m with Paul and Bob every step of their concerned way. Getting a fish back is paramount, or should be, but sometimes the exquisite beauty of what the boys catch is not exhibited to the full, which is a shame. Many viewers are not anglers and don’t realise that a perch, say, is every bit as lovely as a nuthatch or a wild brown trout is more wondrously speckled than a thrush. I had initially started to put our native fishes in some sort of beauty parade ranking, but quickly gave up on that. All are equally spectacular, even the bream ( Mortimer, are you listening?).

In past years, when guiding or simply fishing, I have tried my darnedest to take portraits of fish captures in the shallows as release is taking place, that “and away” moment if you like. There are good reasons for this. Often in the white heat of triumph the appreciation of the fish in your net is lost, at least dulled. So fast is the adrenalin pumping that absorbing details is impossible, or certainly it is for me.

Trophy shots of good fish are okay I suppose and have come to be expected, but they rarely do a fish’s loveliness justice. Half the time, you are looking at the captor, or the background or the way a fish is being held. All that sublime piscine grace is lost and is only truly taken on board when you see the fish back in the water, in the shallows, highlighted hopefully by the benign gaze of the sun. It’s those seconds or minutes that are the making of angling’s magic.

Some of you, hopefully many of you, will know this already, but there will be others who think I’m a pious old prat and despair that this newspaper continues to pay so handsomely for my weekly spoutings. I do speak what I see as the truth, however, and I feel there is a contemporary message here. One of my dearest fishing companions is Kate, who would like to fish far more than she does if only her high-powered job would let her.

When she does get an odd moment to herself she’ll get a fishing fix by going to YouTube but in a recent email she expressed her concerns: ”There’s much of the hot summer weather to go but many of these films show scant regard for coarse fish in low oxygen conditions. Barbel are the 'in' species it seems and pretty much all the films are obsessed with bagging up and hammering the fish with very questionable fish care. Even worse, half the time actual swims are flagged up so those barbel get no chance to recover. Gosh, I’m sounding very righteous in all this, but I just don’t understand how and why people are motivated in catching barbel endlessly one after another and then want to crow to the world about it. Sorry, but it’s just not right.”

It will come as no surprise to you that I think Kate is 100pc correct and that I’m 100pc behind her...150pc as most Premiership footballers like saying. The question is, how do you encourage a change in anglers’ mindsets and make them realise their captures are fragile pearls of nature, not commodities on shelves. It’s no use Kate and me blithering on and that’s why I get back to Mortimer, Whitehouse “ and away”.

In any filming session, they rarely catch more than one or two fish, which is good, but the fact they treat them like gold dust is better still. Less is more and you only have to tune in and see Bob’s ecstatic face beaming over every capture to understand that. There’s no preaching with Paul and Bob: they’re just two seasoned blokes doing naturally what they feel is right. If those YouTube film makers won’t listen to me, than perhaps they’ll cock an ear to the “and away“ mantra because we’ve never needed this message to be heeded more.