Jeremy Clarkson has revealed the lucky coincidence that potentially saved his life after a health scare.
The Clarkson’s Farm host underwent a heart procedure in October 2024 after experiencing tightness in his chest and pins and needles in his arms – and after going to hospital, doctors told him he was maybe days away from a heart attack due to blocked arteries.
Clarkson opened up about the experience on the first episode of Clarkson’s Farm season five, airing 3 June. He attributed his deterioration to the “stressful” pressure of opening his pub, The Farmer’s Dog, just weeks earlier. “I’m back and not dead,” he told farm sidekick Kaleb Cooper, adding: “The grim reaper will have to wait. It was f***ing close, though.”
However, he said it was realising he had pins and needles in his arm while scrolling through his phone that prompted him to see a doctor.
“That was just coincidental – I was scrolling on my phone. If I hadn’t been doing that, I wouldn’t have got pins and needles in my arm and, if I hadn’t got pins and needles, I wouldn’t have thought, ‘Hang on, I’m having heart problems’, and I wouldn’t have gone to hospital.”
Clarifying that it wasn’t a heart attack, Clarkson told Cooper: “They found I’ve got really bad coronary artery problems”.
He explained: “You’ve got three arteries that feed your heart with blood; one of them was totally blocked, one of them looked like something angling from the roof of a cave in the Peak District, and one of them had got so clogged up it had had to form branches. So my heart wasn’t getting any blood.”
Doctors considered performing open heart surgery on Clarkson, but mended his arteries by putting in stents. “I should be as good as new,” he said, before telling Cooper he was advised to stay away from manual labour for six weeks.
In October 2024, Carkson said he first started struggling while swimming from a boat to the beach while on holiday on a small island, explaining that: “It wasn’t far, maybe the length of two swimming pools. But when I finally reached the beach, there was more water in my lungs than there is in Lake Superior, and I was mostly dead.”
Upon returning to the UK, he was rushed to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford in an ambulance. Clarkson said that the “sudden deterioration” that “began to gather pace” left him especially concerned after the death of Alex Salmond from a heart attack earlier this month.
Clarkson’s Farm returns to Prime Video on 3 June.
