Spring has sprung! Yes! Maybe you’re just not feeling it yet, but don’t despair: Springwatch is back to squirt the jam into your summer doughnut.

A weird, oddly jarring and slightly sexual image, maybe, but resident intense ornithologist Chris Packham has a strange effect on people.

In Monday’s first episode, for example, Chris is sat on a giant African termite mound – like that’s the most normal thing in the world – explaining that when the rains come, that tower is going to erupt in a ‘sexual generation of termites’.

The erotic tension is palpable. Chris’s intense glare is laser-beaming me from beyond the screen. Forty million termites are about to spurt into the world, providing a protein-rich feast for migrating curlews to gobble, to fatten themselves up before flying back to the UK.

It’s oddly disgusting and yet delivered with such charm at Chris’s gunfire pace that you get into it. The thing is, with his jabby claw-hands jutting at the camera and casual yet admirably weird delivery, Chris is mesmerising. Like some weird, mythological hybrid created by the God of Telly, Chris Packham seems made of a chunk of Jools Holland, a dash of Sid Vicious and a sprinkling of Terry Nutkins’ charisma. Quite a combo. He is a bird man, through and through, and the excitement rubs off on you, the reluctant viewer, even if your only engagement with the outdoors in the last 24 hours was popping to the shop to stockpile Jaffa Cakes and seeing a manky pigeon.

Now I’m (clearly) obsessed, but I was dismissive about Springwatch, and all the other –watches at first. These BBC naturefests make you feel a bit like being back in school assembly with the adults’ knees pointing at you while gently explaining the world, as if to a really, really slow person.

But I have decided that Springwatch really is the ultimate game-changer when it comes to any stress you might be experiencing.

For its 10th series, the BBC juggernaut fronted by Packham and Michaela Strachan has moved its 100 people and 24 remote-controlled cameras to the “birding mecca” of Minsmere in Suffolk. The 2,500-acre RSPB reserve is home to more than 5,600 species, from bearded tits to rare slime moulds.

Any doubts about your enthusiasm at this point might seem reasonable, until an absurd rant from Chris, which I tried to jot down on my phone to prove to myself I wasn’t going mad.

“Look at that big eye!” says Chris, jabbing at a stone curlew before continuing: “In days gone by, people used to catch these stone curlews and charge people with jaundice to look at them!

“Such was the power and beauty of that big eye they thought that eye would suck the jaundice out of them!”

Before you have a chance to ponder the strangeness of this, you’re off to stare at an avocet building a nest in a puddle.

Even the Springwatch weather report has a go at cheering you up.

Yes, it might be raining, but it’s good news for the badgers hunting the worms!

As if to overprove its love of oddness and all things British, the BBC also serves up a lesser-spotted Bill Oddie. Bill’s in an anorak, watching birds and he doesn’t give a hoot about the rain, so why should you?

The Springwatch team are having so much fun on this show (or doing a great job of pretending to) that it’s as alluring as the smell of someone else’s barbecue.

The technical blips come thick and fast, and you can play Who Will Swear First (my favourite pre-watershed telly game, with Oddie odds-on favourite) while enjoying slice after slice of British countryside in all its glorious technicolour.