Jeremy Clarkson has gone so green, I thought he was going to quote Greta Thunberg: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS gives five stars to the new series of Clarkson’s Farm – read his glowing review

Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon Prime)

Judgement:

Jeremy Clarkson once claimed that global warming made him want to “shoot a polar bear right in the middle of the face.”

He says he watches David Attenborough’s documentaries like a drinking game, having a beer every time climate change is mentioned.

The 64-year-old presenter and petrolhead is therefore an unlikely advocate of green agriculture. But with the return of Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon Prime) – his incredibly popular television diaries of mayhem and mishaps on his 1,000-acre rustic retreat in Oxfordshire – he’s teaming up with a millionaire pop raver to promote ‘regenerative farming’.

Simply put, this means cutting back on chemicals and planting a mix of arable crops to make the land healthy again.

His conversion seems about as plausible as Chris Packham commenting on F1, but he’s serious. What an irony if Clarkson becomes the chief ambassador for the back-to-nature policy – ​​although then again, no one could have predicted before Amazon Prime launched this show in 2021 that he would be the man who makes farming fun and fair would show. cool.

Clarkson’s opinion has been changed, he admits, not by climate statistics or conservationists, but by the impact of extreme weather on his farm.

As the show opens, he complains about “the driest summer in 87 years.” That’s 2022 – no doubt he’s just as dissatisfied with the eighteen months that followed, officially the wettest since filming began.

The brutal drought caused his potatoes to develop ‘skinning’, a condition in which the tubers close like mussels. Because they could not grow, they remained inedible pebbles. The sunflowers also dried up and the ground was too hard to plant oilseed rape for next year’s harvest.

A famous farmer needs a celebrity solution, so Clarkson turned to Andy Cato, once the keyboardist for 1990s electronic hit group Groove Armada. Cato sold the rights to his songs six years ago to buy a farm and now runs a company that promotes a more natural, less intensive approach to food production.

“Our soils are so overburdened and poisoned that they won’t be there within a few decades of giving up,” he tells Clarkson and his land agent, Charlie Ireland. ‘We have lost 80 percent of our insects. We can’t keep doing that.’

‘NB!’ shouted a warning label that shot across the screen, and “this is important!” I half expected Clarkson to reenact Greta Thunberg’s famous lament, “You stole my youth!”

Cato’s methods are not organic, but rely on selective use of chemicals, rather than spraying crops with insecticides and fertilizers. He plants wheat and beans mixed, because the plants support each other.

And here’s the bit that really caught Jezza’s attention: he sells his cereal to Marks & Spencer. Just the mention of their brand brought a loving smile to his face.

Cato made a less positive impression on the real star of the series, 25-year-old Kaleb Cooper, now a business manager and still driving combines as if they were go-karts.

With his rich Cotswolds accent and untamed facial hair, he is a true Wurzel – and he resented a lecture on agronomy from a man he considered downright an amateur.

“Were you in a band?” he growled at Cato. ‘I can say. Because you ran a tractor with a pound of fuel per gallon.”

With his crops failing and the district council forcing him to close his lucrative restaurant, Clarkson was pushed to find alternative money spinners.

First he harvested the hedges for blackberries, boiled sugar for jars of jam (he calls it Jeremy’s Juice and there’s a picture of him on the front, but if you’re going to buy your jam from an egomaniac this is just to be expected ).

The jam, simmering in large terrines, looked delicious. I’d love to see a comparison test where Jeremy tastes Meghan Markle’s American Riviera Orchard strawberry preserves, while the Duchess tastes his blackberry spread. Sussex vs Chipping Norton – what a massive match.

Together with his girlfriend Lisa Hogan, Clarkson then started raising pigs in the dried-out potato field. The running joke of the show is his epic incompetence, and I wonder how many times he deliberately makes a dick for the camera… knocking down a brick wall, knocking down a fence, putting up some five-bar fences. so that neither opens properly.

But he insists the scenes aren’t scripted, relying on his gift for constant rants. Every now and then, muttering endlessly to himself, he comes up with a perfect sentence: as running costs rise, for example, he complains that the profit-and-loss column “looks like Boris Becker’s bank balance.”

And as he maneuvers a huge blackberry picker through a narrow alley, he worries he’ll encounter a bus coming from the other side: “He’s going home with a picker strapped to his face like a mustache.”

However, the one perfect joke didn’t fall on Jeremy, but on Lisa. As he rambled on about rare breeds, he explained to her in detail that his favorite breed of pig, the shandy and the black, was almost extinct.

“Shandy and black, it sounds like something a Northern woman would drink in a pub on a Friday night,” he opined. “But a few years ago there was only one human pig in the whole world.”

“Pig,” Lisa said.