Jeremy Clarkson’s ‘Heart-Stopping’ Moment Revealed Ahead of His Return: A Revelation That Will Give Fans Chills!
The fifth series sees an entertaining but now familiar crop of chaos at Diddly Squat farm
Even non-farmers know that agriculture is cyclical. Broadly speaking, each year, the same things happen again and again. This is both a blessing and a curse for Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon Prime), the TV show. The series, one of Amazon’s tent-pole hits, can cleave to the pattern of the seasons, telling gratifying stories of sowing and reaping, gestation and new birth. But it also means that, as the show goes on, it has to avoid repeating itself. There are only so many times you can laugh at someone failing to herd sheep or slipping in a cow pat. (Admittedly, I can laugh at someone slipping in a cow pat quite a few times.)
For series five, Clarkson’s Farm opens with perhaps the ultimate bombshell, to borrow the JC parlance, of its star nearly dying. There is footage of the ambulance carting him off and our hero all wired up in the Oxford Heart Centre. His ticker wasn’t getting any blood, he tells his sidekick Kaleb Cooper. He very nearly had a heart attack – one of his arteries looked like “something dangling from the roof of a cave in the Peak District”.
Anyone with a basic working knowledge of the cardiovascular system along with Clarkson’s proud stance on diet and lifestyle (and doctors) will be none too surprised. But in television terms, his own near-death may be the apotheosis of the Clarkson TV doctrine, whereby you set things up to go wrong and then create TV gold by filming them going wrong while pretending you can’t believe they’ve gone wrong.
In this regard, Clarkson’s pub, The Farmer’s Dog, is a stroke of genius, as it throws up continual opportunities for episodic calamities – the cesspit’s full; the Corrs are in town for a music night; let’s make a Santa’s Grotto and so on.
The other crop now returning a decent yield is Clarkson’s partner, Lisa, who, whenever the story harvest fails, can be relied upon to go and find some new animal to breed. Several cute Valais Blacknose sheep duly appear in one barn and Jeremy pretends he had no idea. Then 10,000 snails arrive in another (so that Lisa can make a face cream from their slime) and Jeremy pretends that he had no idea.
These are all stage-managed catastrophes, as they have always been on Clarkson’s Farm. The thing with a stage-managed catastrophe, however, is that if it is managed well enough, it’s still very funny, and ever since Top Gear and The Grand Tour, Clarkson has proved himself the master of the modern staged farce. From the voice-over to the edit, he knows exactly what is required, from the “I had a brainwave” ironic intro, to the thing falling over or blowing up.
It’s when things don’t go wrong that Clarkson’s Farm malfunctions. Episode two of the new series, set after Rachel Reeves’s farmer-bashing budget in 2024, sees Clarkson umming and erring about whether or not to play people’s champion at the farmers’ protest. And I would say that his reception in London from the real farmers when he does speak is… a little muted.
Similarly, there’s an excursion to the Netherlands to see the future of farming that ends up with Clarkson buying a robot tractor to plough his fields for him. The funny thing is that robotic farming, whether it’s the future or not, is completely boring. The “Agbot” only becomes a viable storyline once it breaks.
And so as long as things can continue to go wrong in a controlled fashion, there’s no reason to think that Clarkson’s Farm needs to shut its gates. Just as long as Jeremy eats his Greek yogurt, listens to Lisa and goes easy on the red meat.
The first four episodes of Clarkson’s Farm series five are available on Amazon Prime Video on Wednesday, June 3, continuing weekly