Meanwhile, Back on ‘Clarkson’s Farm’
Every episode of the popular show proves that the secret to life is finding something you love and devoting yourself to it.
By Kyle Smith
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How confident are you that you could land an airplane in an emergency? According to a YouGov survey, nearly half of American men (46%) thought they could do it, with 20% (!) expressing high confidence. A dour follow-up story on CNN (where else?) said “experts” (who else?) disagreed. These would be the experts crying out, “You’re violating a number of important federal regulations! It’s much better to let us crash!”
To the average woman, the idea that the average man could land a complicated passenger aircraft on his own is ridiculous. Only 1 in 5 women expressed any confidence they could bring the bird in safely. But where would we be without men attempting to do things they’re absurdly unqualified to do?
This brings me to the only television show I really care about, look forward to, and tear through upon its debut each year like a castaway putting away an airdropped crate of beef jerky. The reality show “Clarkson’s Farm” has dropped its fifth eight-episode season on Prime Video. Its namesake star, Jeremy Clarkson, remains the small screen’s indispensable man.
Mr. Clarkson takes a childlike joy in every new problem he tackles, especially the ever-expanding number of gizmos and gadgets with which he cultivates and harvests in the Cotswolds, a couple of hours northwest of London. The fifth season features so many new and cool machines that it’s essentially “Toy Story 5” for graybeards.
Mr. Clarkson, who was by some estimates the biggest star on the BBC with his long-running automotive adventure program “Top Gear” until he got sacked in 2015 for striking a co-worker, moved on frictionlessly to a similar program, “The Grand Tour” on Prime Video. Then he decided, in his 60s, that an inveterate city slicker could have fun running a farm.
Gently putting a 747 down on the tarmac might be easy by comparison. Advised and corrected by experienced professionals, the farmer Kaleb Cooper and the agronomist Charles “Cheerful Charlie” Ireland, Mr. Clarkson nevertheless is a model of ineptitude, his starry ambitions forever crashing into the tree stumps of his incompetence. Even after five years of sowing and reaping oats and barley while raising sheep and cows, Mr. Clarkson continues to find new ways to fail.
Yet Mr. Clarkson, 66, is another kind of model for all of us gentlemen of a certain age and a generous waistline in that he simply keeps getting on with it. He never gives up. This is living.
To some extent, “Clarkson’s Farm” is a fantasy. Mr. Clarkson is very, very rich. For him, losing tens of thousands of pounds on a mistake is slapstick, not suffering. This year the net loss on his farm was more than £5,000. His many nonsuccesses he punctuates with a rueful running commentary that never ceases to be hilarious: “Oh, my giddy aunt.” “Such a fiddly job.” He complains that a birding expert asked to come do her scouting at “O’crikey o’clock.”
But Mr. Clarkson is also much like many other men in their later years. He has accomplished his main goals in life, he has achieved financial security and his children are grown. After two marriages ended in divorce, he enjoys a long-term relationship with his Irish girlfriend, Lisa Hogan. What to do now? Grumble at the news channels on TV? Sleep late, do the Wordle and fire up the martini shaker at 3 p.m.?
No, Mr. Clarkson proves in every episode that the secret to later life is finding something you love and devoting yourself to it. There may be no money in it, there may be no point to it. No one else may care. But the farm isn’t a hobby, it’s his passion. Not only does he put physical toil into it, he also keeps devising amusing new side quests.
After running into regulatory headaches operating a restaurant he built on his property to turn some of his produce into meals and beer, he launched what’s now an enormously popular pub, the Farmer’s Dog (and somehow lost more money despite lines out the door). This season the pub hosted Dare Night: Patrons were served, or subjected to, sheep hearts, fried squirrel, pig’s ears, snail caviar and a chili sauce rated 15 million on the Scoville scale—triple what’s in police-level pepper spray. Mr. Clarkson helpfully put out milk-filled fire extinguishers “in case your mouth catches fire.” Of the chef who designed it, he says, “Not since Oppenheimer has anyone been as scared of their own creation as you are by that.”
In the process of finding a new vocation, Mr. Clarkson also built himself an odd new family whose members always wrap up the season with a picnic. In addition to Lisa, Kaleb and Charlie, he is joined by the cheerful, mulleted expert in building stone walls, Gerald Cooper—no relation to Kaleb Cooper—who speaks in a rural accent so dense that the people who write the subtitles for him are forced to type in “unintelligible” for much of what he says. The odd-couple mismatch of the well-traveled Jeremy and Kaleb, who had never been on a train before his boss took him to continental Europe on one, continues to yield comedy gold. “They’re gonna be the size of zeppelins, those sheep,” remarks Mr. Clarkson in one of the new episodes. “What’s a zeppelin? Like, a zebra?” replies Kaleb.
Even under the shadow of prostate cancer, for which he had surgery last summer as shown in the final episode of the new season, Mr. Clarkson proves a model for us all. “Mercifully,” he says, “in farming, you don’t ever have time to dwell on personal matters. Because there’s always something to do.”
Mr. Smith is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.
This was great to read. I bought my 10.38 acres in 2014 and have been working it with my wife ever since. We have a large orchard of cider apples, chickens, sheep and waterfowl in their seasons, and a garden for our table. It's been a great retirement - I wouldn't trade it for anything, but I also wouldn't advise anyone to do it. It's a ton of back breaking work and a literal sink hole of cash.