It would be too much to say Jeremy Clarkson is complex, or an enigma. He does not contain multitudes. But he does have the disarming ability to present different versions of himself. At one end of the Clarkson spectrum is the rightwing bully columnist, bigoted in print and serially unpleasant in person; at the other is the presenter of Clarkson’s Farm (Prime Video), a perfectly agreeable celebrity-out-of-their-depth reality show, documenting Jeremy’s chaotic efforts to turn 1,000 acres (405 hectares) of Oxfordshire into a profitable concern.
The unobjectionable first season softened Clarkson’s reputation, but the second one arrives amid a lingering hubbub of outrage. A few weeks before the new episodes’ release, Bad Clarkson, horns aglow, spoiled Slightly Less Bad Clarkson’s moment by writing an article about his irrational loathing of Meghan Markle that was so horrible the Sun took it off their website. So it is, again, bewildering to press play on a well-made, good-humoured countryside caper, fronted by a man who comes across as nothing more than a mildly irascible bumbler. You simply cannot picture this guy punching an underling for bringing him the wrong dinner. It takes time to adjust.
Diddly Squat, the self-deprecatingly named farm in question, is itself in transition. Having tired of the boneheaded unpredictability of sheep, Clarkson has a fresh plan: cows, plus an on-site restaurant based around premium Diddly beef. Footage of the enormous queues for the Diddly Squat farm shop – filmed after season one of the show had alerted local people to its presence – show that the demand would exist, but there is work to do first. Clarkson uncertainly haggles over the price of the cows themselves, then struggles to keep them fenced in and winces as his new friends undergo artificial insemination procedures. Elsewhere, moisture in the barley harvest proves frustrating, as does the motorised towbar on Clarkson’s tractor, and connecting a downpipe to a water butt.
It’s grand-scale pottering that is comforting and pleasantly distracting. But then, Clarkson has always offered his viewers and readers comfort. Historically his prime audience has been men confused by modernity, dismayed at being told climate breakdown is real, furious at the news that they’re no longer allowed to be rude about people who aren’t English; it comforts them to see someone pointlessly jabbing at the things that annoy them. Clarkson’s Farm does chuck them a few scraps: our host observes that a lot of people killed by cows are ramblers, “which obviously is fine”, and at one point he reinforces a popular misunderstanding of what the HS2 rail project was designed to achieve. Classic Clarkson is also there in the scene where he falls asleep in front of a health and safety instructional video, and in the regular namedropping of specific models of cars: he reacts to a cow breeder’s price for a heifer and calf by saying, “You could get an Alfa 159 for that!”, and has a moan about the police not being able to stop vandals setting fire to his barley store because they’ve recently been made to replace their manly Mitsubishi L200s with weedy Vauxhall Corsas.
The farming Clarkson is, however, sensitive to the beauty and the strife of his new situation. While other hate-for-clicks opinion writers have moved into television by pumping out further dross on shonky, garish rolling news channels, Clarkson is out there gently padding through a field in pursuit of his adorably errant cows, enveloped in a dawn mist that has deliberately been filmed to look as gorgeous as it does. And, while he might naturally be a Tory, he’s not afraid to point out that farmers have been betrayed by Brexit, their lost EU subsidies replaced by meaningless slogans.
His most valuable talent, though, is for comedy, and the funny parts of Clarkson’s Farm are very funny. There is endless amusement in the odd-couple relationship between the clueless landowner and Kaleb, his assistant: while the knowledgable Kaleb unabashedly informs Clarkson about every one of his many stupid farming errors, his boss hits back by ribbing the younger man about his lack of wider life experience. This year, we learn that Kaleb has never been on a train, and considers people from Oxford to be “foreign”.
Fast-talking dry-stone-wall expert Gerald, meanwhile, is a gift from the sitcom gods, popping up now and then to offer a strong view on hedges or combine harvesters in an accent that makes only one word in 20 intelligible. A new sideline in chilli-growing also prompts an infectiously hilarious scene in which Clarkson and two chefs try to make chutney from Naga chillies, which are so hot the fumes from the pan leave all three of them overcome by coughing, then laughter, then more coughing. It’s something the man’s many, not-incorrect detractors might not have thought him capable of: harmless fun.
