Could I, a normal bloke, run a crystal meth empire? Could I survive on a mysterious, sinister Pacific island? Could I spend years in combat training so I might kill the leader of a zombie army? So much of great TV is about taking ordinary people and exposing them to the crucible of the extraordinary. It permits the audience to analyse and hypothesise about their own suitability for the task – and no show of recent years has done this with greater panache than Clarkson’s Farm. Could you artificially inseminate a heifer?
“There have been a few changes,” Jeremy Clarkson, the proprietor of the Diddly Squat Farm announces in the opening monologue to this, the second series of his self-titled Amazon Prime show. The “ruinously expensive” sheep are gone, the durum wheat is flourishing, and the farm shop has created so much traffic that locals apparently can’t get to their Covid vaccinations. But, otherwise, things are as they’ve always been: Kaleb full of earthy impertinence, Gerald rambling in his unintelligible West Country brogue, Lisa and Charlie the rare voices of common sense, and Clarkson himself, constitutionally cack-handed. It’s a winning formula, and one they know not to mess with.
