Jeremy Clarkson has gone so green, I thought he was going to quote Greta ... trends now
Clarkson's Farm (Amazon Prime)
Jeremy Clarkson once claimed that global warming whingers made him want ‘to shoot a polar bear in the middle of its face’.
He says he watches David Attenborough documentaries as a drinking game, chugging a beer every time climate change is cited.
So the 64-year-old presenter and petrolhead is an unlikely champion for green farming. Yet, as Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon Prime) returns – his improbably popular telly diaries of muddles and mishaps on his 1,000-acre Oxfordshire rustic retreat – he is teaming up with a millionaire pop raver to promote ‘regenerative agriculture’.
Simply put, this means cutting back on chemicals and planting a mix of arable crops to coax the land back to health.
His conversion seems about as plausible as Chris Packham commentating on F1, but he is in earnest. What an irony if Clarkson becomes the chief ambassador for back-to-nature politics – though, on the other hand, no one could have predicted before Amazon Prime launched this show in 2021 that he would be the man to make farming look fun and even cool.
Jeremy Clarkson stands with his crew for season three of Clarkson's Farm beside Diddly Squat's quirky entrance
The former Top Gear presenter holds one his newborn piglets close to his chest on the farm
Clarkson, 64, pulls one of his trademark expressions as he rests against his machinery stuck in a ditch
Clarkson’s mind has been changed, he admits, not by climate stats or conservationists but by the impact of extreme weather on his farm.
As the show opens, he’s moaning about ‘the driest summer for 87 years’. That’s 2022 – no doubt he’s equally unhappy about the 18 months that followed, officially the soggiest since records began.
Relentless drought meant his potatoes developed ‘skin set’, a condition where the tubers close up like clams. Unable to grow, they remained inedible pebbles. The sunflowers dried up, too, and the ground was too hard for planting oilseed rape for the next year’s crop.
A celebrity farmer requires a celebrity solution, so Clarkson turned to Andy Cato, once the keyboard player in 1990s electronic hit group Groove Armada. Cato sold the rights to his songs six years ago to buy a farm and now runs a company promoting a more natural, less intensive approach to food production.
‘Our soils have been pounded and poisoned to a point where they’re within a few decades of giving up,’ he tells Clarkson and his land agent, Charlie Ireland. ‘We’ve lost 80 per cent of our insects. We can’t keep doing that.’
‘Pay attention!’ screamed a warning label blazed across the screen, and ‘this is important!’ I half expected Clarkson to parrot Greta Thunberg’s famous lament, ‘You haf stolen my childhood!’
