The Prime Video series, Clarkson’s Farm, has made Diddly Squat farm in Oxfordshire world famous. It’s a great show, which sheds welcome light on land-use, farming and food policy in the tradition of William Cobbett.
But Jeremy Clarkson's visceral hatred of local authorities as they regulate planning and food safety is dangerous version of personal freedom.
Jeremy Clarkson makes excellent TV programmes. The former Top Gear presenter has a rare ability to reach through the screen and grab his viewers' attention.
His latest Prime Video show, Clarkson’s Farm, which has just finished its third series, has brought the attention of very large audience – up to five million people a week – to a topic normally destined for 5.45 in the morning on Radio 4, or the cocoa-assisted Sunday evening rural idyll slot on BBC 1. It’s also big in China. The Clarkson brand travels.
The show isn’t about food safety – obviously – but food is at its very centre – where and how it is made and the societal, legal and cultural structures that determine the nature of farming. However, Clarkson’s Farm isn’t a branch of public service broadcasting, or the lush backdrop to a former Blue Peter presenter put out to pasture.
Populated by well-defined and likeable characters, it’s down and dirty visceral TV – up at four o’clock in the morning to milk the cows, down in the straw with a heavily pregnant, Oxford Sandy and Black sow, heaving bags of decomposing mushroom compost onto a trailer, scything through stinging nettles.
Topic and format work perfectly. It’s a reality we (urban dwellers) don’t normally see, mediated by Clarkson’s everyman persona, nurtured for years on Top Gear – bumbling, amateurish, somewhat work averse, loving gadgets and dangerously immune to instruction manuals. This is in a real world that matters. We all go to the countryside, or live in it, we all eat.
Jeopardy and resolution
In reality, Clarkson has the financial means to do whatever he wants. He purchased 1,000 acres of prime Cotswolds land, in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 2008 and began farming it, full-time, in 2020, alongside a lucrative reality TV deal.
Surprise, surprise, here’s the spin. Clarkson – middle England’s Mr Petrol Head – is now ‘into’ the environment. Over three series, he re-wilds a large portion of the farm with wildflower meadows and native woodland, dams a stream to create a trout pond, tries regenerative farming – a two-crop system of beans and cereal – and makes forays into jam, nettle soup and mushroom production, in nearly always doomed attempts to sure up Didley Squat Farm’s meagre income.
Series three of Clarkson’s Farm was filmed in 2022, so this is serious stuff. War racked up the prices of fertiliser and diesel and the weather was a peculiar and, for farming, catastrophic, mixture of torrential rain and extreme heat and dryness.
TV shows love jeopardy and resolution. We, the audience, want Clarkson, his partner Lisa, his go-to Chipping Norton rustics, Kaleb (yes, that’s his real name) and Gerald Cooper (who speaks in an incomprehensible Oxfordshire dialect), and his dry and shrewd agronomic adviser, Charlie Ireland, to succeed against the odds. How could we not want to?
This man calls milk ‘cow juice’ and mushrooms ‘space penises’. We see him fail to harvest blackberries with a Henry vacuum cleaner, spend money on a bramble clearing gadget that does not work (he decides to use goats instead), fail as a wasabi farmer and get stung, literally, trying to turn a profit from selling nettle soup in his shop. When Clarkson says, ‘I’ve had an idea’, you know that it’s going to go wrong. One of his ideas works – very well. It’s a in-piggery crash barrier, designed to stop sows from rolling on and crushing their baby pigs. It’s called ‘Clarkson’s ring’.
Rural Rides re-visited
The show is a re-tread of the utopian and nostalgic idea, promoted in William Cobbett’s 1830 book, Rural Rides, of the self-sufficient ‘yeoman farmer’. That book looked to the past, before the enclosures of common land, as a golden age. Clarkson’s farm looks forward to a re-wilded, regenerative, carbon negative golden age.
We know that Clarkson loves his over-powered Lamborghini tractor a bit too much. We know that his Barber jacketed neighbours mine bitcoin for a living in the city, and that the wealthy Cotswolds have, for the most part, become a rustic theme park – a Marie Antoinette-style fantasy of rural life. We also know that subsidy driven, over-intensive arable farming has degraded English soil and led to biodiversity collapse, while making fortunes for the wheat barons of the arable heartlands – or it did.
Didley Squat’s timely and topical experiment in green farming – ‘farming the unfarmed’, as Clarkson calls it, is a reiteration of Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (1821). The book, still in print, is both a pollical tract and a practical manual. It contains Information ‘Relative to the Brewing of Beer, Making of Bread, Keeping of Cows, Pigs, Bees, Ewes, Goats, Poultry and ... of the Affairs of a Labourer's Family’.
Cottage Economy comes wrapped in a flag of freedom – what if I could live self-sufficiently, as a ‘yeoman’, free from the tyranny of alienating employment, aristocrats and pollical and economic control? This ‘what if’ is embedded in the collective psyche of the over-industrialised English, with their historically dreadful food and penchant for bottled condiments to make it edible.
Three-mile tailback
It’s in all of us who are not aristocrats – even in wealthy Jeremy Clarkson. His Didley Squat Farm – with its three-mile tailbacks of visiting car-encased Top Gear fans, newly enthusiastic about eco farming, is emblematic of an England that we would like to live in – one with flowers and bees (Clarkson sub-lets to a Ukrainian bee keeper in one of his few successful ventures), beer (he has a sideline in Hawkstone Premium Lager), home-made jam and a pig being nicely fattened up for Christmas, with household scraps.
It's the freedom part of the dream that is problematic. For all his radical credentials, William Cobbett, like Clarkson, was deeply socially Conservative. A US version of Clarkson might be a redneck in pick-up truck, denying the legitimacy of federal government to raise taxes and to prevent massacres with assault rifles.
Listen, England is a small country and we need to be nice to each other, right? The Didley Squat brand, sadly, has traces of toxicity. Let’s unpack freedom from planning laws. The farm’s local authority, West Oxfordshire Council is portrayed, throughout each series, as a monstrous Kafkaesque bureaucracy, solely devoted to crushing personal initiative and all pleasure – the enemy.
You see, the council dared to object to Clarkson converting his lambing barn into a highly successful restaurant, without planning permission. That’s when the traffic started backing up to the local village, Chadlington, because of Top Gear tourism, much to local people’s annoyance. Planning may be boring and, yes, bureaucratic but it is still run by democratically elected local government. We need planning, so that homeless people are not forced to live in tiny units in poorly converted office blocks, under ‘permitted development’, exempt from public scrutiny and controls.
Truly painful
Freedom from food safety and trading standards laws? Er no, don’t think so, Jeremy. It must be truly painful for an EHO to watch Clarkson’s Farm, especially the kind who believes in coaxing the wilfully ignorant into compliance, rather than serving notices. OK, it’s a bit of an act – Clarkson stumbling over the clumsy, non-phonetic acronym Haccp (thanks NASA), or thinking that CCP stands the Chinese Communist Party, rather than critical control point. But isn’t that a bit worrying for a food business operator? Clostridium botulinum is a thing, Jeremy. It kills people.
It’s a good job that his proposed mushroom-based product line, powdered lion’s main, was subject to a bacterial and water activity test, in an ACAS-accredited lab. The sample was contaminated, and it failed. Actually, Clarkson had been sceptical from the beginning, viewing the product as a new age fad for the over-leisured Chipping Nortonites.
To be fair, Didley Squat’s emporium, now the most famous farm shop in the UK, if not the world, is fully Haccp-complaint (live with it, Clarkson) and it suffers the tyranny of a level five food hygiene rating score. Clarkson’s colleague in the show, his adviser, Charlie, is a shrewd and intelligent man, moderating Clarkson’s bluffness and impatience and providing a welcome balance.
He knows what a Haccp is and that you have to have one. He speaks the language of council planers and knows how to navigate sensibly their rules and conditions, without dumping manure on the town hall steps, or using a verbal blunderbuss. ‘Cheerful Charlie’ provides the show with much-needed balance.
Jeremy Clarkson is a powerful and influential man. That gives him responsibilities. A new law was introduced as a direct result of the show – ‘Clarkson’s clause’. It extends farmers’ permitted development rights, outside Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, to convert farm building to other uses, such as homes and shops – probably a quite sensible idea, but we’ll see.
Few challenges
To millions of people, Clarkson, rightly or wrongly, is a folk hero, akin to a rich Robin Hood – an everyman (not an everywoman). Here, the distorting, amplifying and dumbing down effect of social media comes into effect. Look at any thread beneath a review or story about the show – typical comment “you are helping everyone, fighting the government and getting raked over the coals for it. The UK’s Trump”.
There are few, if any, challenges to his council-hating orthodoxy. This gives Clarkson a fast track to politicians, like Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove, who wish to demonstrate their deep understanding of what the man on the Chipping Norton omnibus is thinking (whoops, there isn’t one – privatisation).
Now look at this comment on Clarkson’s Farm, from a very reasonable, and nice, West Oxfordshire District councillor, Dean Temple, who, following series three, felt obliged to resign. He said: "I was sitting there watching it as a fan, laughing away, thinking, ‘This is brilliant, this is fantastic, this is... ah, sugar'. All of a sudden I was getting calls, death threats from all over the world because, apparently, I’m a nasty individual."
You have created something culturally important, Clarkson, like Orwell did, with Animal Farm, an allegory for the state. You understand global warming and you are advocating farming and landscape policies, including diversification, with which most reasonable people agree. Your lager is probably quite good (I’ve never tried it), unlike your cider (which has a tendency to explode, because it’s still fermenting). Personally, I would steer clear of your powdered lion’s mane until it’s proved to be safe – not that you are selling it.
Your council is trying to be nice to you. Its online statement says: “As a planning authority, we have a responsibility to make sure that national and local planning laws and policies are followed correctly by everyone. We have worked with the owners and planning agents of Diddly Squat Farm for many years, offering to help the business with planning applications and supporting them to diversify and make changes on the site.
“The work [the farm] is doing to highlight the wider challenges faced by farmers is commendable. We will continue to treat Diddly Squat Farm fairly and we will be happy to work [with it] on any future plans. Our door has always been open and will remain open should they choose to work with us.”
Underneath the statement are two hundred and ninety-five negative comments, with not a single dissenting voice: “As a Council you are a great example of what's wrong with this country...” “It is clear that you DO NOT help local farmers.” West Oxfordshire District Council, killing the countryside one farm at a time.”
That says a lot about councils’ failure to get messages across about positive service delivery. One of problems of environment health is that, if it’s done well, it’s invisible. All the more reason to point out its successes.
Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018 and his written for many publications including The Guardian and The Observer. The views expressed here are purely his own.