Clarkson’s farm: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS critiques the weekend’s TV
Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon Prime Video)
Useful tip if you ever drop round to Downing Street – don’t bash the door knocker. Jeremy Clarkson‘s chief farmhands did, and got a thorough scolding.
Kaleb Cooper and Charlie Ireland, the duo who really run Clarkson’s Farm, were summoned to meet the Prime Minister in the second half of the latest, third series following life on Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm.
‘Just a hint,’ snapped the flunkey who ushered them inside. ‘If you knock that loud again, I’ll throw you out.’
‘Sorry, we’re farmers,’ the pair apologised. ‘Don’t care, I’m not!’ came the reply.
Kaleb has been this show’s saving grace from the outset. His honesty and amiable lack of sophistication are the antidote to Jezza’s highly mannered cynicism. How long he can maintain this innocent bumpkin’s persona before it becomes a caricature is another question.
Jeremy Clarkson’s TV show following life on his Didly Squat Farm has entered its third series
Clarkson and others loading pigs and piglets onto a truck in one episode, wrapped up in wooly hats, gilets and wellies
The former Top Gear presenter proves he’s a hands-on owner as he herds one of his pigs around a paddock
Ambling round Westminster, he was greeting people with a cheery, ‘Morning!’ — fully aware that no one in the unfriendly city would acknowledge him.
His idea of sightseeing was to point out places where the traffic flow had flummoxed him: ‘I didn’t put my indicator on at this junction here,’ he remarked in Trafalgar Square, ignoring architectural details such as the National Gallery.
And when he finally met the Prime Minister, the first thought he blurted out was, ‘You’ve got lovely hair.’
‘Had you heard otherwise?’ asked Dishy Rishi.
This adventure is a lively moment amid overstretched longueurs, in a series that should have been condensed by a couple of hours.
Good jokes and interesting digressions become dull when they are repeated — and there’s a lot of repetition.
It’s fun to see Clarkson’s faux surprise that the bags of oyster mushrooms he’s ripening in an old air-raid shelter have produced cartloads of fungi. It’s less amusing when he collapses in shock every time he goes down there.
Kaleb Cooper (pictured) and Charlie Ireland, the duo who really run Clarkson’s Farm, were summoned to meet the Prime Minister in the second half of the latest, third series (pictured)
Kaleb Cooper and TV presenter Clarkson – Cooper and Charlie Ireland are the real brains behind Clarkson’s operation and manage the day-to-day running
Despite Clarkson’s jokes, Christopher Steven finds series three repetetive
And the breakdown of farming costs on a whiteboard in the final episode is so boring, I was starting to hope he’d announce he was bankrupt just to bring the litany to an end.
Clarkson insists it’s never been so hard to make a living from agriculture — but I was hearing the same complaints from Chipping Norton farmers when I was chief reporter on the Cotswold Journal, decades ago . . . back when Jeremy had a curly moptop.
Sun shines, rain falls, crops grow, farmers moan — it’s the circle of rural life.
Despite the eco-preaching about chemicals and replenishing the soil in earlier episodes, Clarkson is as keen as always to tweak the fluffy tails of vegans.
In one segment, he goes hunting roe deer, after an endless section on the firing range where we’re treated to a display of his marksmanship.
With a deer in his sights, he hesitates at first but is soon serving venison burgers to visitors. ‘You’re eating Bambi,’ he chortles.
All that is in odd contrast to the final collage of clips, set to Cat Stevens’s plaintive hippy anthem, Where Do The Children Play? What next, sing-along-a-Greta?