Clarkson’s Farm Review – you can call him Jeremy Kardashian | Television

By now, five series in, the fatal bug at the heart of Clarkson’s Farm has gone undetected. Ultimately, this must be a reflection of failure; about some oafish guy who goes into a business he doesn’t know much about and messes up everything.

Except, well, isn’t it, right? Because in real life, Clarkson’s Farm has been so successful that Clarkson now dominates the entire Cotswolds in his image. Its Farmer’s Dog pub is now such a popular attraction that it recently converted the adjacent site into a 360-square-metre car park – the same as a supermarket – to cope with demand. His farm shop Diddly Squat is a souvenir, offering anyone who wants to buy hats of the type and cupsor have a jar of honey with Clarkson’s face on it. And that’s not even mentioning his Hawkstone beer brand, which said it had sales of £21.3m in the year to March 2025 and is aiming to put Peroni “out of a job”.

All of which makes the very good-natured Clarkson easy to take. If the point of Clarkson’s Farm is to show people how difficult it is to be a farmer, however Clarkson’s biggest problem is the number of pint glasses that guests steal from his house, which seems like a very difficult problem to deal with.

What’s really interesting about the fifth series is that you can see Clarkson Farm trying to deal with this in real time in a number of ways. First, and least of all, it leans a little on real-life situations. The series begins with iPhone photos of Clarkson in the hospital with chest pains. Years of depression and bad living have caught up with him, and he reveals that he was apparently days away from a serious heart attack.

And so much of this new series is dedicated to that. They reach for weight loss tools. He started eating yogurt. He should rest and relax wherever possible, except for the 2024 farmers’ demonstrations (which are reduced now, because he ended up being his face). At this point, we end up following her as a Kardashian. Of course there is a market for this kind of thing – you can’t turn a shopping mall into a thriving community if no one is interested in you as a person – but it makes you miss the real farming.

Especially when the actual agricultural products are very well made. The joy of Clarkson’s Farm is that Clarkson is so eloquent that you find yourself engrossed in his interests. Unlike Countryfile, which offers a seemingly unsophisticated perspective, there’s always something interesting to watch Clarkson tackle the challenges of modern farming. There’s a bit here where they get someone to perform necropsy on a sheep that’s hilarious and disgusting in equal measure.

The most satisfying parts of the show come when Clarkson stops pretending and sees agriculture as a subject worthy of its time. Most of these resources are devoted to the modern things necessary to make farming profitable, and his search for these leads him to some strange places. He meets a potato farmer in the Netherlands who has renovated every aspect of his farm – even setting it up as an airport to help with pesticide use – to cut costs and increase yields.

This is nonsense, all heat maps and soil analyzes are granular data, and they should be as cold as sewer water. If the show was called Random Dutch Potato-Grower’s Farm, it would be lucky to get a few viewers. But it’s Clarkson’s enthusiasm for this – his great enthusiasm and schoolboy enthusiasm – that really sells it. And when he finishes taking the commercial, we find ourselves back where we were when the show started, with a man eager to learn more about himself. This is Clarkson Farm doing its job, and when it does it like this, there’s nothing better.

The problem is that there aren’t nearly enough. As things stand, Clarkson is now a man with his own gravitas. But Clarkson’s Farm works best when it forgets all distractions and remembers to get its nails dirty. A little extra of that would go a long way.