After the eco-preaching, Jeremy’s serving up Bambi burgers now: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews the weekend’s TV
Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon Prime Video)
Handy tip if you ever visit Downing Street: don’t hit the door knocker. Jeremy Clarkson’s key farmhands did so, and were thoroughly scolded.
Kaleb Cooper and Charlie Ireland, the duo who really run Clarkson’s Farm, were called in to meet the Prime Minister in the second half of the final third series, after life at Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm.
“It’s just a hint,” snapped the servant who led them inside. “If you knock that hard again, I’ll throw you out.”
“Sorry, we’re farmers,” the pair apologized. “It doesn’t matter, I won’t do that!” came the answer.
Kaleb has been the saving grace of this show since the beginning. His honesty and amiable lack of refinement are the antidote to Jezza’s high-mannered cynicism. How long he can keep up the persona of this innocent bastard before it becomes a caricature is another question.
Jeremy Clarkson’s TV show about life on his Didly Squat Farm is in its third series
Clarkson and others load pigs and piglets into a truck in one episode, wrapped in wool hats, vests and boots
The former Top Gear presenter proves he is a hands-on owner as he herds one of his pigs through a pasture
As he strolled through Westminster, he greeted people with a cheery “Morning!” – fully aware that no one in the unfriendly city would recognize him.
His idea of sightseeing was to point out places where the flow of traffic had confused him: “I haven’t put my indicator on at this intersection here,” he noted in Trafalgar Square, ignoring architectural details such as the National Gallery.
And when he finally met the Prime Minister, the first thought he blurted out was: ‘You have beautiful hair.’
“Did you hear anything else?” asked Dishy Rishi.
This adventure is a lively moment amid overloaded longueurs, in a series that should have been shortened by a few hours.
Good jokes and interesting digressions become boring when they are repeated – and there is a lot of repetition.
It’s fun to see Clarkson’s false surprise that the bags of oyster mushrooms he’s aging in an old fallout shelter have produced cartloads of fungi. It’s less funny when he collapses in shock every time he goes downstairs.
Kaleb Cooper (pictured) and Charlie Ireland, the duo who actually run Clarkson’s Farm, were called in to meet the Prime Minister in the second half of the latest third series (pictured)
Kaleb Cooper and TV host Clarkson – Cooper and Charlie Ireland are the real brains behind the Clarkson operation and manage the day-to-day operations
Despite Clarkson’s jokes, Christopher Steven finds series three repetitive
And the breakdown of farming costs on a whiteboard in the last episode is so boring that I started hoping he’d announce he was bankrupt just to end the litany.
Clarkson insists it has never been harder to make a living from farming, but I heard the same complaints from Chipping Norton farmers when I was chief reporter for the Cotswold Journal decades ago. . . when Jeremy had a curly mop top.
The sun shines, the rain falls, the crops grow, the farmers groan – it’s the circle of rural life.
Despite the eco-preaching about chemicals and soil replenishment in previous episodes, Clarkson is as eager as ever to tweak vegans’ bushy tails.
In one segment he goes hunting for deer, after an endless section at the shooting range where we are treated to a display of his marksmanship.
With a deer in his sights, he hesitates at first, but soon serves deer burgers to visitors. “You’re eating Bambi,” he chuckles.
All of which is in strange contrast to the final collage of clips, set to Cat Stevens’ plaintive hippie anthem, Where Do The Children Play? What now, sing along with Greta?