What’s the real cost of farming? About £200million, Jeremy?
On holiday recently in a faraway land, I found myself sat at the pool bar next to a chap from Chipping Norton. The conversation inevitably turned to the phenomenon that is Clarkson’s Farm and it transpired he knew a lot of the locals who feature in the series.
Of course, I had to ask, does Gerald Cooper really talk like that?
(Fans of the series will know Gerald as an amiable dry stone waller and stereotypical country bumpkin whose Cotswold country patter is completely unintelligible.)
“Of course not,” said my new friend. “Not even when he’s hammered.”
“The producers decided it would be funny to make out he spoke yokel nonsense.
“And Gerald said... ‘as long as you’re paying me I don’t care what you do’.”
This is just the start of the televisual artifice that is Clarkson’s Farm – and of course, so many other ‘reality’ shows that we’re all glued to nowadays.
The main message from the third series from the former
Top Gear ranter is that farming in the UK is one never-ending struggle against nature, the weather and regulations.
To get to the heart of this we see Jeremy and his girlfriend Lisa struggling through a brutal winter which claims the lives of new-born piglets, a sow, their crops and ultimately their ‘livelihoods’ as, once again, the end-of-year profit comes in at a miniscule amount.
Profits from farming might be hard to come by, but profits from the show have rocketed.
Clarksons Farm 3 was instantly No.1 on the Amazon platform when it launched last week, eclipsing last month’s hit Baby Reindeer, in just the same way the previous two series have stormed the charts.
Amazon has a global hit on its hands about... farming!
And speculation is rife about how much Clarkson himself is making out of all this, with the Daily Mirror this weekend claiming his fee for the three series comes in at £200m.
Really? That would put him ahead of pretty much all the highest-paid actors in Hollywood.
Whether that’s true or not, that sort of money buys a lot of Lamborghini tractors and luxury goat feed and takes a bit of the shine off the life-anddeath jeopardy of a rapeseed harvest failing.
But all the artifice aside, it’s genuinely surprising that a whole new audience has been made aware of the debate around farming by this most unlikely of champions.
The man who spent all those years as the poster boy for carbon emissions is now subject to the whims of a very unpredictable world climate – an irony which was pointed out to Clarkson by builder Alan in Series 2.
Let’s face it, Jeremy loves to be seen as a no-nonsense cheeky rogue who tells it like it is, but he’s not really a nice person is he?
This is the man who punched a Top Gear producer in the face because, diddums, he didn’t get a hot dinner. Although, he also once punched the imbecile Piers Morgan three times, so perhaps that cancels it out.
And of course, the nonsense he wrote about Meghan Markle doesn’t even bear repeating.
In Series 3, Jeremy goes somewhere unexpected – to suggest that monoculture UK farming done the time and tested way is not actually very good for the environment, although we are ultimately all complicit in this because we must have cheap food (at all costs).
He does this by allowing some experimental farming in one field which mixes crops to put nutrients back into the soil.
Of course, the people doing the experiment aren’t hippy idealists, but celebrity farmers; a bloke who was in the band Groove Armada and the former BBC6 DJ George Lamb.
Now the petrolhead fanatics who tuned in because they loved Clarkson’s motorised piffle are exposed to the debate about food sustainability and may even be questioning what we’re doing to our diets, our landscape and our eco-system.
Perhaps this strange turn of events is worth paying Jeremy... about £200m?
I would take a considerably smaller sum to provide some
Profits from farming might be hard to come by, but profits from the show have rocketed
crisis PR management advice to West Oxfordshire District Council, who for good or bad reasons come out of all three series very, very badly (but that’s showbiz!)
Clarksons Farm 3 is available on Amazon Prime.