Clarkson’s Farm: a review

We’ve just finished watching all three series of Clarkson’s Farm and it was brilliant. I’ve known about the series for a while but dismissed it because I always thought Jeremy Clarkson was a motorhead who hates vegans and cyclists and indeed I think he probably does. However, I saw some headlines about him shedding tears for his deceased piglets on the show so my view of him softened and I decided to give it a go.

For those who don’t know, Jeremy Clarkson is famous for hosting the TV show, Top Gear, which is about cars; 33 seasons of cars. I have not watched a single episode as I have about as much interest in cars as collecting varieties of dog poo. But in 2008 Clarkson bought a productive farm in the Cotswolds which was run by a local farmer up until 2019 when the farmer retired. Jeremy then decided he would try farming it himself and the Amazon series was born.

I’ve always been interested in farming and particularly in how our food is produced. Clarkson’s Farm is entertaining not just because it’s informative for us city slickers, but also because Clarkson knows so little about farming himself which leads to lots of comic mishaps. There’s also a particularly endearing character called Gerald who speaks with such a heavy local accent that he’s indistinguishable to all but the locals. Here’s a small clip with some Gerald language at the end.

I never knew what a combine harvester was or did until watching this program. Clarkson does a good job of raising the profile of farming and the challenges farmers have. He’s very transparent about farming costs like seeds, fertiliser, farm equipment and fully trained sheepdogs (£20,000 apparently!) and then how much he gets for his grain which is variable from year to year and often affected by weather. I’ve also been impressed with his entrepreneurial spirit which expands beyond the traditional farm crops to mushrooms, bramble jam, nettle soup (that was a bit of a failure), crisps, beer, chilli sauce and probably other things I’ve forgotten. Then there’s the battle with the local authority over his farm shop, restaurant and carpark.

It’s hard to watch his visits to the abattoir when he takes his farm animals to their deaths but I was pleased to see he also found it very difficult. And of course there’s the piggy scene in season 3 that has both Clarkson and his girlfriend in tears after losing a sick piglet they tried to nurse back to health. But I couldn’t help wondering why they don’t feel any cognitive dissonance here as the pig would have been taken for slaughter while still very young anyway. He also takes back the dead pigs as sausages and has no qualms about eating and selling them. That seems very strange to me.

I believe they’re working on a season 4 now. It got 9/10 on IMDB which is very high and is number 1 in the UK right now on Amazon prime. Somewhat inexplicably, the 64-year-old and self-described “unfit, fat and old” Clarkson was this week voted the sexiest man in the UK.