I’m back and not dead,” Jeremy Clarkson announces, at the outset of the new series of Clarkson’s Farm. “It was f***ing close though.” He’s talking about a blocked artery – which necessitated a hasty heart procedure back in 2024 – but he might as well be referring to his reputation. Time after time, Clarkson has pulled back from the brink, like Michael Caine slithering across the coach floor in The Italian Job. But are the British public being suckered by this avuncular agricultural Clarkson? Where has the provocateur gone? Is the series, now in its fifth season, nothing more than an exercise in “farmwashing”?
Clarkson’s big money move to Amazon has proven a successful distraction from the numerous controversies that made him unpalatable at the BBC. For years he flirted with breaching the organisation’s impartiality guidelines: he referred to then Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a “one-eyed Scottish idiot”, called the Welsh language “a silly maypole around which a bunch of hotheads can get all nationalistic”, and repeatedly drew flack for his blasé attitude to road safety.
