Clarkson’s Farm will really grow on you
In the opening of his new show Jeremy Clarkson stands in an empty field. Beside him is a comically huge tractor he’s bought but can’t operate and surrounding him are hundreds of hectares of farm land he has nine days to cultivate.
“The most important job of all is planting wheat and barley in all these big fields,” he gestures. “How do you do that? No idea. Honestly. I have absolutely no clue.”
Which is a problem for the former motoring presenter because that’s exactly the job he’s taken on in new series Clarkson’s Farm, which is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
That he doesn’t know what he’s doing won’t be surprising to anyone who ever watched Top Gear, the incredibly popular motoring series he hosted for 13 years. Each week he tackled the show’s car-based challenges with a combination of boorish bravado and foolhardy schemes. But despite his big talk and grandiose plans he routinely proved he had all the real-world usefulness of a triangular wheel.
He did have an overwhelming, yet misguided, belief in his own competence, however. “When the previous farmer said ‘I’m jacking it in,’ I just thought, ‘I shall farm it myself!’,” he booms. “Everybody said, ‘you’re stupid. that’s the stupidest thing ever. You’ll never be able to do it.’ ” The premise of the show is basically Clarkson attempting to prove everyone wrong. Despite owning his sprawling 404ha farm in Britain’s picturesque Cotswolds for 13 years he doesn’t know anything about running it because “a chap from the village” did it for him. It’s hard to believe he didn’t realise how difficult farming actually is before taking it on. But it’s also easy to believe that he believed he’d be a farming natural and that he, Clarkson, could do it.
He may be “pushing 60, smoked
A show about farming should be boring. Clarkson’s Farm isn’t. Even if you don’t care for Clarkson — and many don’t — give it a shot.
three-quarters of a million cigarettes and had pneumonia”, but none of that stops him from diving straight into the farming deep end where he promptly finds himself sinking.
“Why don’t farmers all have coronaries?” he groans from his barnyard office upon learning the rain that’s just started won’t stop for six days. This drastically reduces the available time he has to plant — or in farming lingo “drill” — the seeds for his crops. Each day he’s late costs him tonnes and tonnes of yield from each field which in turns costs him tens of thousands of pounds.
“The situation now, I’d call it desperate,” he says, staring despondently at the ceiling, before praying for the rain to stop.
But the rain doesn’t stop. Instead Britain is plagued with what Farmers Guardian magazine describes as “Biblical flooding”. Turning to camera he accurately says he couldn’t have picked a worse year to start farming.
After the rain clears Clarkson wisely hires a 21-year-old local to help turn him into a farmer. However, like Clarkson before him, Caleb Cooper underestimates the job’s challenges.
“What drill have you got?” Cooper asks, as he formulates a plan to plant as many seeds in as many fields as possible in the short window they have available.
“A red one,” Clarkson answers, causing Cooper to splutter back, “a red one?” “Actually, it’s orangey,” Clarkson clarifies. “A reddish-orange.”
It turns out the drill is bright yellow. But it’s a good example of how out of his depth the broadcaster is.
“You’re screwed,” Cooper later wails, while surveying the fruits of Clarkson’s day of labour drilling the field with his tractor. “You haven’t even drilled it straight. That’s as straight as a roundabout!”
On Top Gear when Clarkson screwed up, which his “time-saving” and “improved” methods often did, it only cost him bragging rights for a week. Botching a job on his farm, however, has real consequences and a terrible flow-on effect that negatively affects every part of his new existence. It’s a realisation that slowly dawns as the first episode progresses.
It makes for compelling viewing. Especially as Clarkson appears to have brought his Top Gear production team with him. The show is filled with spectacularly shot, gorgeous landscapes of the farm.
If you weren’t seeing how much hard yakka farming involved you could almost be tempted to swap the open-plan office for the open landscape of farm life.
But even as he’s embraced by bad luck and forever racking up owngoals, Clarkson doesn’t give up.
Standing in the middle of the field he’s haphazardly cultivated and done an absolutely awful job of drilling seeds he smiles. When he speaks you can hear big satisfaction and a small hint of triumph as he says, “I’m actually doing farming”.
A show about farming should be boring. Clarkson’s Farm isn’t. Even if you don’t care for Clarkson — and many don’t — give it a shot. I suspect it will really grow on you.