Image credit: Amazon Prime
Since its launch on Prime Video in June 2021, Clarkson’s Farm has proved an unexpected ratings juggernaut – or should that be combine harvester?
The show’s concept – Jeremy Clarkson tries his hand at being an amateur farmer – was built on the idea that his buffoonery would generate some laughs. But then a two rather interesting things happened.
The first was that Clarkson’s Farm didn’t just generate laughs – it drew a massive audience. In the UK alone, episodes regularly exceed 5 million weekly viewers, making it Amazon UK’s biggest show.
The second was that Clarkson ended up falling in love with farming, in spite of its myriad drawbacks.
The fourth series, currently on air, continues to garner mammoth audiences, and raise both laughs and awareness of the plight of rural communities in general, and farmers in particular.
But what is the reality behind the success? We fired up the tractor of truth, hitched it to the plough of perspicacity, and cultivated 12 choice facts about the hit series.
Speaking at a farmers’ demonstration in November 2024, Clarkson admitted how severely he had underestimated the difficulties farming would involve. “I lived in London for 25 to 30 years,” he said. “Like a lot of people who live in cities and go on Twitter, I thought farmers drove around in Range Rovers moaning until February and then they all went skiing.
“Then about five years ago, I started farming and I have come to understand just how unbelievably difficult it is, and complicated and dangerous and cold, very cold, even in the harvest it is cold. And it’s the costs that staggered me… All the equipment costs a fortune. And if you try to price what you’re selling to accommodate that, there’s just a lot of moaning.”
Clarkson’s Farm is 100% real and artifice-free. Top Gear and The Grand Tour, Clarkson’s previous shows, took certain liberties with the truth, with supposedly spontaneous scenarios often meticulously devised in advance. “The Grand Tour, everything was planned, literally everything, you know, ‘Richard move your eyebrow that much’,” Clarkson previously explained.
And, he confessed to journalists, he and his co-presenters were playing a role: “Richard Hammond isn’t as stupid as he’s made out. I’m not as bombastic as it’s made out, and James May isn’t quite as boring as is made out.”
Not so on Clarkson’s Farm. “What you see actually happens,” he added. “Nothing is planned on this, nothing, I have no script… I don't have time to pretend to be someone else.”
Those real situations also come with real emotions – never more so than in the third season of the show, when a number of newborn piglets died on the farm. Clarkson, who has a particular fondness for the creatures after his mother gave him toy pigs regularly as a child, described it as a “heartbreaking time”.
But it wasn’t just Jeremy who was devastated. His partner, Lisa Hogan, was also distraught – and it was the first time he’d ever seen her weep. “I’d never, ever seen Lisa cry, not once, until all this started and was unfolding. It was terrible,” he later recalled.
One of Clarkson’s crusades on the show has been to highlight the plight of farmers, resulting in him being named Farming Champion of the Year in 2021 by the National Farmers’ Union. But one farmer in particular has reason to be grateful to the show.
Dairy farmer Emma Ledbury lost 60 of her 120 cows to bovine TB in 2022. When this was revealed on the show, viewer Rebecca Poole was moved to start a GoFundMe campaign, which raised almost £40,000 to help keep Ledbury’s farm afloat.
Not content with highlighting the problems faced by farmers, Clarkson has thrown himself into another imperilled industry: buying a pub in nearby Burford in the latest season of the show.
Emma McClarkin, chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), hopes he can work a similar alchemy on her chosen trade. “I really hope the programme – just as it did for farming – begins to open everybody’s eyes about how you run a pub, how difficult it is and what support we need,” she has said.
At the turn of the millennium, there were more than 60,000 pubs in Britain, according to the BBPA. Today, that figure has fallen to 45,000.
Clarkson’s well-publicised, life-saving heart-surgery last October was required because of “60 years of really bad living, and of two weeks of ridiculous stress and no sleep”. That stress, it turns out, was caused by his race to open the pub.
“I wanted to try and capture the August Bank Holiday weekend, which meant we were trying to open it at the exact same time as I was doing the harvest,” he told The Telegraph. “So, I’d spend all day trying desperately to get the pub open and dealing with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of problems.
"Then you get home absolutely knackered, and you have to get into your tractor and do grain carting through the night. So it’s not really a secret [that] the stress was so bad.”
One of the undoubted stars of the show is Kaleb Cooper, 26, Clarkson’s farm manager. Despite his encyclopaedic agricultural knowledge, he’s not from a farming background. His mother gave him three chickens for his 13th birthday, from which he built a 450-hen egg-selling business.
As a teenager, he skipped school to learn the ropes on a dairy farm. Today, he works a shattering 115-hour week, spread across numerous farming enterprises. Clarkson considers him to be “the most entrepreneurial person I have ever met”.
Fittingly for an entrepreneur, Cooper has embraced – and monetised – his newfound celebrity status. He is a Sunday Times bestselling author with three books to his name. He ‘writes’ them by recording his thoughts into a Dictaphone while driving his tractor, which are then reassembled by a writer. I
n early 2024, he embarked on a 37-date, six-week UK tour, performing a live show, The World According to Kaleb, to 59,000 people. He hated being away from home, so would contact local farmers on Facebook, and go and visit their farms.
The last live show was filmed and is now available to watch on Prime Video.
Cooper’s touring commitments meant Clarkson needed to hire help to cover his absence. This came in the form of Harriet Cowan, a full-time nurse and sometime farmer from Belper in Derbyshire. She is the daughter of a nurse and a farmer, proving the organically grown apple never falls far from the tree.
Like Cooper, Cowan proved an immediate hit with viewers, who delighted that she shared her predecessor’s ability to mercilessly tease her hapless boss. A devotee of TikTok, she has seen her following on the app grow from 35,000 when she joined the show to 586,000 followers today. Despite her popularity, though, she was only a temporary replacement for Cooper.
Of calls to keep her, Clarkson told The Sun: “It’s a reality show. We don’t just bring characters in because the TV show needs it. You bring them in because you really need them. I loved Harriet to bits… but the truth is, we’ve got Kaleb, and he might go off and do Celebrity Love Island or something, and if I can’t manage, I’ll call Harriet in a heartbeat.”
The show’s popularity has come with attendant problems. Sometimes, fans do more than just visit the farm shop, as Clarkson told The Telegraph. “When the house had just been finished, Lisa was in her bathroom and this couple just walked in,” he recalled.
“They said, ‘We thought we’d have a look around.’ I know it’s nice to look around somebody’s house, but not when you haven’t knocked on the door. It’s weird, is what it is. They were perfectly pleasant, and they simply couldn’t see that they were doing anything wrong.”
What with dying piglets, a stressed-out partner, and uninvited guests, Lisa’s lot is not an easy one. And that’s before you consider how difficult it must be to win an argument with Clarkson.
“Why argue with someone like Jeremy? He’s so eloquent. I have to be a bit more… nimble,” she told the Mail on Sunday. So she came up with a solution for engaging in some of their more difficult conversations. “I’ve worked out that when he’s wearing a mic, he can’t interrupt me. So that’s when I go for it.”
Clarkson’s vocal support for farmers has seen him hailed as the “political hero the country is crying out for” by Sebastian Payne, director of the Onward think tank, in the i newspaper. One respected pollster, James Kanagasooriam, suggested the nation could even have its “Trump moment” with Clarkson at the helm.
The man himself, however, has demurred. “I think really we have now learnt that newspaper columnists make very bad prime ministers,” he said. “Like Boris, I have an idea for a column and present an argument. Next week I will probably write the complete opposite… I’d be a terrible leader.”
He also told The Times: “I’d be a terrible political leader, hopeless. I’m a journalist at heart, I prefer throwing rocks at people than having them thrown at me.”
Series four of Clarkson's Farm is available to watch on Amazon Prime
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