You don’t win many friends in the liberal media by recommending Jeremy Clarkson content. But Clarkson’s Farm, series three of which recently landed on Prime Video, deserves more than grudging respect.
For about 30 years or so, the honking automobile fetishist has been acting as tribune for a particular class of arrested adolescence. Dad rock. Dad jeans. Dad politics. All that. A decade and a half ago, when in Poland, I passed a bookshop groaning with copies of Swiat Wedlung Clarksona. That’s The World According to Clarkson. Millions of unreconstructed Supertramp fans longed for the planet to be remade to meet his shaggy needs.
Clarkson’s misdeeds are well documented. On the BBC’s Top Gear, he joked about lorry drivers murdering sex workers, made dubious remarks concerning various nationalities and slung around gay slurs (if “ginger beer” still counts). He was famously removed from the programme after allegedly punching one Oisín Tymon, a producer, over a row about the non-availability of hot food. If you want more, Top Gear is one of the few television programmes with a stand-alone “controversies” entry on Wikipedia.
All of which may explain why Clarkson’s Farm, in which Clarkson takes to the soil in west Oxfordshire, is not quite so celebrated as it deserves. In the aftermath of Oisingate, Amazon waved several squillion-dillion pounds beneath the Top Gear team’s noses to lure them into the streaming fold. Millions followed them to Prime, but the show never achieved the wider resonance of the BBC show. After three series that stuck to the magazine format, it was decided to swivel to stand-alone epic journeys. Earlier this year, for instance, for no obvious reason, the team drove across the Sahara in an episode titled (brace yourself) Sand Job.
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By that stage, Clarkson’s Farm had become its creator’s undisputed flagship. The first episode of the second season passed out Amazon’s insanely expensive The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to register as the most watched original series on the service in the UK. Full redemption may have been gained if ... well, if Clarkson could have stopped himself from being Clarkson.
The concept is all in the two-word title. In episode one, first broadcast a little over three years ago, the presenter explains he is setting out to run a 1,000-acre farm near the notoriously media-infested town of Chipping Norton. Clarkson is honest about the fact that, unlike most other farmers, he is cushioned by a fortune made in broadcasting. No grown-up will believe him to be in the same sort of financial peril that visits his neighbours when their crops fail or their animals perish. As if to press home the point, virtually his first move was to shun the good people at Massey Ferguson and buy a Lamborghini R8.270 tractor. Yes, apparently there are such things.
Clarkson’s Farm exists in the penumbra between documentary and reality television. The show either happened upon or engineered some perfect casting. Clarkson is Clarkson: a giant child set loose in a Brobdingnagian sand pit. His comic foil is young, thatch-haired local Kaleb Cooper. Charlie Ireland, advising agronomist, is the voice of constantly aghast responsibility. Clarkson’s partner, Lisa Hogan, a charming, forgiving Dubliner, starts off at the edge of the frame, but moves closer to the action in later series.
The world knows the presenter too well to believe in any Damascene conversion. But, though Clarkson’s Farm does have its Top Gear moments – a hovercraft appears for no good reason in series three – it is genuinely trying to connect with the harsh realities of agriculture in the 21st century. The scourge of the green movement even finds himself railing against climate change.
Sadly, the quasi-reinvention looked to come to a shuddering halt when, early last year, in a column that exceeded even Clarkson’s reputation for ill-will, he suggested that Meghan Markle (whom he “hates”) should be forced to “parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain”. He issued an unusually abject apology. Variety reported he “likely won’t be appearing in any new shows on Prime Video beyond 2024″.
Memories are short. Later that year, a fourth series was commissioned. Last month, season three arrived and proved the most emotionally churning so far. Episode four, during which Clarkson and Hogan struggle to keep newborn piglets alive, has reduced hard-bitten TV critics to pools of salty lachrymosity. It is sentimental about animals. But it also acknowledges they will one day be sausages. That conflict is at the core of the show’s success – a skilful, if reductive, treatment of rural conflicts that has appealed to both the farming community and urban milksops. Clarkson’s Farm is the best thing he has ever done. Yet many may still not feel able to bring themselves to watch him. Fair enough. That’s Swiat Wedlung Clarksona.
