Once again, Jeremy Clarkson has proved that he has learned diddly squat from the success of his Prime Video TV show, Clarkson’s Farm. That series has very consciously cast the pugilistic ex-Top Gear host in a more kindly light: he has gone from potty-mouthed petrolhead to amiable amateur farmer, fretting about his sheep and the challenges of crop rotation.
But now – and not for the first time – he has ripped up much of that goodwill with an unpleasant rant that makes you wonder if the more pleasant Clarkson we see in Clarkson’s Farm is merely an act for the cameras. In 2022, the target was Meghan Markle, whom he fantasised about booing in a Game of Thrones-style shame walk. Now it is the turn of BBC nature presenter Chris Packham, who had the nerve to critique the dystopian reality, as he sees it, of industrial-scale farming in the UK.
What did Packham have to say specifically about Clarkson’s Diddly Squat demense in the Cotswolds? Not much, it turns out. Watching the opening credits of Clarkson’s Farm for Celebrity Gogglebox, Packham merely pointed out that the title sequence to the smash series painted an unrealistic picture of modern-day farming. “That’s not what a farm looks like. Most farms are horrible monocultures which have been sprayed with deadly chemicals,” he said. “The ground has been pumped full of fertiliser, and most of the animals are indoors, in crates, being crushed and kept in the dark.”
It’s a fair point – aimed not so much at Clarkson as at the large-scale farms that care only for profit. But a red rag had been flourished, and the presenter could not help himself. Like an angry motorist fuming when a cyclist cuts him off, he was straight in, honking the metaphorical horn in Packham’s direction.
“The endlessly angry Chris Packham went on Gogglebox this week and erupted in blind fury about the Winnie the Pooh-ish opening credits to my farming programme,” he thundered in the Sun. “Now, of course this kind of stuff plays well in a room full of nose rings and Palestine flags at a vegan activist meeting in Hackney. But he was on a television programme, and it didn’t play well at all. Because it’s b*****ks.”
Chris Packham made his comments about the state of farming on Gogglebox (Photo: Channel 4)Never mind the particulars of Clarkson’s diatribe against Packham – what does it say about the duke of Diddly Squat? A wiser presenter than Clarkson would have shrugged off the comments. In fact, viewers of the most recent season of Clarkson’s Farm might have expected him to do exactly that – given the sympathetic portrait it painted of a one-time firebrand coming to terms with his mortality following a bombshell cancer diagnosis, which he revealed on camera to his stunned protege Kaleb Cooper (he is currently in remission).
The most recent series of Clarkson’s Farm did feature plenty of the old, unlikeable Clarkson. Among those flashpoints was a scene in which he hijacked his own Guy Fawkes Night celebrations to burn an effigy of Keir Starmer in protest at new inheritance tax rules which will target farms worth more than a million pounds (a category that presumably includes Clarkson, with his estimated net worth of £60 million).
But the overall tone of the series was one of thoughtful melancholy. In the first episode, he was rushed to hospital with an ominous chest complaint. Then came the cancer reveal and a sign-off in the finale from his hospital bed. Even those with a healthy loathing of Clarkson will have been overcome by a weird feeling of empathy.
But now he’s gone and ruined it all with another ill-tempered rant. While the comments he made about Markle (also in a Sun column) in 2022 were of a different order of seriousness to his rant about Packham – he cheerily envisaged peasants flinging excrement at her, though has since apologised – there are echoes of those disgraceful remarks here.
In both cases, you can see the mask slip and the aura of jolliness the presenter has cultivated with Clarkson’s Farm evaporate. Underneath is the same mean-spirited boor who made Top Gear so unlikeable – an unreformed petrolhead with a hair-trigger temper and a superiority complex stinkier than the out-of-order loos at his pub, The Farmer’s Dog.
Television is all about projecting a fantasy – especially the sort of reality fodder that is Clarkson’s speciality. But his latest outburst suggests Clarkson’s Farm does not tell the whole story; that the cuddly Jeremy we see pottering around in the fields is just one side of a more complicated character. The old TV villain of the Top Gear years has yet to be put out to pasture.
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