Green Clarkson, in his Lamborghini tractor
WHAT’S TO BE done with Jeremy Clarkson? Keep it clean. Well, the BBC didn’t know. It parted company. Along came Amazon and, after a few more years of messing around in cars for The Grand Tour, we now have Farmer Clarkson. Ooh aarr!
Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon) may be just about the funniest show you watch this year, and it was surprisingly touching, too, not least for the star of the show.
We never saw it on Top Gear, but the presenter properly teared-up when he took three ewes who were no longer of any use to the farm to the abattoir. He’d grown to love the flock he called his “sex-mad illness machines”, but not even wading through a small hillock of regulation with an abattoir manager could stop the ex-motoring journalist’s vulnerable side showing – well, at least until he ate them in a tasty-looking shepherd’s pie.
I do hope Captain Slow and the Hamster were watching. All jolly japes in that format and plenty of those here too, though farming ones this time, from herding sheep with a drone to working out new ways to plough a field, to having a dry-stone-wall builder kick down your own rather useless effort: “The bulls will have that over...” All in a rich Cotswold accent.
In some respects, we were never too far from Top Gear on this 1,000-acre farm called Diddly Squat. Clarkson spent the first episode buying lethal-looking machinery at a “medieval fun fair”. He couldn’t resist a Lamborghini tractor – who knew? He’d have had a Ferrari ploughshare in his barn if there had been one.
But arguably the breakthrough star of the piece is tractor driver and farming all-rounder Kaleb Cooper. He will have his own series before you can say “Diddly Squat”.
If Time (BBC One, Sunday) is meant as a cautionary tale for would-be middle-class criminals, then writer Jimmy Mcgovern must take a bow. I’m going to do everything in my power to stay out of prison for the rest of my life. If not, well I deserve what I get, which was pretty much the attitude of Sean Bean’s stoical, but fear-struck Mark, a teacher who found himself doing four years for dangerous driving after killing someone.
The difficult thing is, unless wrongly convicted, he doesn’t have my sympathy at all. Then again, he is Sean Bean, and if you spend long enough watching this actor you do eventually think, “Well, you’re not a bad guy. OK, you just did a bad thing etc….” Very clever casting.
But Mark the character did not fit in at all well. “What ya doing…?” asked a fellow lag. “Just settling in,” said befuddled Mark. “NO, what are you in for?” Mark was lucky not to get beaten up for that. He did get a thump for daring to use a telephone
WHO cares about the Baftas anymore? The TV industry? Oh yes. The audience? Not on your life. Many shows that picked up a so-called hallowed gong barely got more than a million viewers. The audience didn’t care to begin with. Then there’s the rich irony about the Best Audience moment. Voted for by the “public”, Diversity’s performance on
Britain’s Got Talent is also the most complained about show of all time. You work it out… someone’s got it wrong. I suggest two ordinary viewers sit on every Bafta jury as well as umpteen TV execs, otherwise it’s just another industry
back-slap. before another stroppy inmate who just didn’t like him and could see a loser a mile away. It was no warming episode of Porridge, eh, Mr Mackay?
I could have done with Mark being a little more middle-class, like a wealthy fraudster doing time who had to regretfully part with his company Range Rover. But Mark does have sympathy for his fellow man – just apparently not enough to stay sober behind the wheel.
Then there’s his prison officer Stephen Graham – who has battles of his own and is trying to protect his son who is doing time. Is everyone at it? Must be the draw of three meals a day and having a roof over your head. Some get Sky television too. What’s to complain about? It is at Her Majesty’s “pleasure” after all.
Far less comprehensible was Loki (Disney+), the glamorous new TV series with Hollywood stars Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson doing a time-travelling, buddy cop show. They were in search of, if you can believe it, “time variants”.
So, did the makers, Marvel, predict the pandemic? Well, that would have been handy but we rarely take the advice of superheroes, especially not Hiddleston’s “God of Mischief ”. After two episodes, I can confidently say it was an enjoyable – though at times boggling – caper with oodles of 1970s styling, which made me feel reassured, not least because their world was so analogue with files of paper, together with pens and pencils. Bliss.
Not that Disney could be accused of pitching this story to the parents too. Heaven forbid. A promising family hit, with Hiddleston as enigmatic as ever.
And with the final episode tomorrow of Inside No. 9 (BBC Two, Monday), make sure you catch up on a wonderful series. Last week, Reece Shearsmith’s nurse was tending to Sir Derek Jacobi’s ex-barrister, now confined to his bed but who had, during his career, made a “pact with the Devil”. I didn’t know they were still a thing. Now only available online I believe.