Most viewers missed the ultimate truth about Clarkson’s Farm
The new series of Clarkson’s Farm (Prime Video) has been getting lukewarm-to-terrible reviews. They say it’s repetitive and contrived. This strikes me as entirely missing the point. Why would you want the show to do anything differently?
We know that Jeremy Clarkson will engineer scenarios simply for the comedy value. We understand that once again there will be cows, sheep, grumbles about bureaucracy, zany business ventures and an indecipherable Gerald. We wait expectantly for the scenes in which Clarkson despairs at things Kaleb has never heard of (the latest being the game of Poohsticks and Roger Taylor from Queen). All of this is exactly what fans of Clarkson’s Farm want to see. And I defy even the most militant Clarkson hater to keep a straight face as he gets covered in diarrhoea while castrating a calf.
As for the charge that it’s boring: series five began with its star in A&E, days away from a heart attack. How much more dramatic do you want things to get?
Episodes five and six are out now (seven and eight follow on June 17, thanks to Prime Video’s drip-drip of a schedule). Life on the farm ticks along according to the seasons. Clarkson is delighted when his AgBot driverless tractor is joined by a FarmDroid seeding robot, which works through the night to plant 600,000 onions.
It’s calving and lambing time, with Clarkson pacing around like an expectant father. There is a diversion into mating snails (“They’re sex machines!” enthuses the snail supplier). And there is a madcap scheme to host a “dare night” at Clarkson’s pub, featuring “food people wouldn’t normally want to eat”.
Obviously, this is done for no other reason than to create good telly, so when the chef points out the dubious economics – the pub usually serves up to 700 people a day with food they actually like, and Clarkson is proposing to serve fewer people with food they almost certainly won’t like – Clarkson comes up with a pretend reason about waste and the cost of living.
The dare-night fare includes sauces of escalating fieriness – billed on the menu as “mental”, “f—ing mental” and “call an ambulance” – which Clarkson samples, a re-enactment of a scene from series two but no less funny for that. Diners are also treated to tripe, lambs’ brains and deep-fried squirrel. I was beginning to think that I’d be up for trying the squirrel, until one diner said it smelt like a pet shop and another went outside to vomit in the flowerbeds.
Clarkson’s detractors like to remind us that he’s a hobby farmer, who can laugh in the face of disaster because the money he’s coining in from Amazon exceeds any losses. But the charm of Clarkson’s Farm comes from seeing how much it all means to him. He is genuinely emotional after helping to deliver a healthy calf – a task so physically demanding that you will fear for his heart. When a fox kills his partner Lisa’s guinea fowl, he is furious, and wants this to be a lesson to Londoners: “‘Oh, I saw a fox in Wandsworth and he was so sweet…’ No he wasn’t, he was a murdering b—–d.”
There’s just one storyline which goes nowhere, although I wish it did. Clarkson discovers that someone has fly-tipped a fridge on his land. What I’d give for a bonus episode in which he tracks down the culprit and deposits a tractor-load of Diddly Squat manure at their front door.
Episodes five and six of Clarkson’s Farm series five are now available on Amazon Prime Video