DEBORAH’S MUST-WATCH TV CLASSICS

Clarkson’s Farm (2021–)

Clarkson’s Farm, I’m sorry to report, is wonderfully enjoyable. I don’t know why I said I was sorry to report that. Because so many want to get at Jeremy Clarkson I suppose.

But if it helps, it is only wonderfully enjoyable because everything goes so horribly wrong.

Clarkson, right, owns 1,000 acres in the Cotswolds that was farmed by someone else, but they are now retiring. ‘So I came up with a plan.

I’ll farm it myself.’

Presumably, he came up with that plan with one eye on Amazon, and some of his mistakes – buying a Lamborghini tractor that is ridiculously huge – were made, you suspect, purely for the entertainment value, but it is entertaining all the same.

It is truly one calamity after another. Black beetles devastate his rape crop. Stored seeds sprout into unplantable carpets. Six weeks of rain put paid to his barley planting.

Along the way there are swipes at his usual targets. At one farmequipment auction he notes: ‘Amazon has said it wants diversity, and we’re doing well because, if you look, there is every type of white man here.’

It is very funny. He invents a barking drone to round up his sheep, but instead it sends them jumping over walls into town. A local lad helps out whose sole ambition is to have as many different haircuts as possible. Yet some moments are very real. Clarkson is plainly distraught when three of his sheep have to be culled. And when Covid first hits – in episode five of the eight – he is, as a lifelong smoker who has had pneumonia, plainly terrified, and does show his vulnerable side.

But mostly you’ll just be wildly entertained.

I am sorry to report.