Clarkson's Farm: The Fatal Flaw of Success

By now, five series in, the fatal flaw at the heart of Clarkson’s Farm has become unignorable. Ultimately, this is meant to be a show about failure; about an oafish man who wades in to an industry he knows little about and mucks everything up.

Except, well, it isn’t that any more, is it? Because in real life, Clarkson’s Farm has become so successful that Clarkson has now essentially colonised the entire Cotswolds in his image. His Farmer’s Dog pub is now such an attraction that it recently had to turn a nearby field into a 360-space car park – the same as a large supermarket – to cope with demand. His Diddly Squat farm shop is a souvenir emporium, catering to anyone who wants to buy branded hats and cufflinks, or to own a jar of honey with Clarkson’s face on it. And this isn’t even mentioning his Hawkstone beer brand, which reported sales of £21.3m in the year to March 2025 and has a stated goal of putting Peroni “out of business”.

All of which makes Clarkson’s mannered whoopsie daisy clumsiness harder to take. If the point of Clarkson’s Farm is to show people how difficult it is to be a farmer, and yet Clarkson’s biggest gripe is the number of pint glasses tourists steal from his pub, that seems like a fairly difficult structural flaw to overcome.

What’s so interesting about series five is that you can see Clarkson’s Farm attempting to overcome this in real time in a couple of ways. The first, and least successful, is to lean a little harder into the reality show element of it all. The series opens with iPhone footage of Clarkson in hospital with chest pains. Years of stress and bad living have caught up with him, and he reveals that he was apparently days away from a catastrophic heart attack.

And so a lot of this new series is given over to that. He gets on the weight-loss jabs. He starts eating yoghurt. He has to slow down and rest wherever possible, save for the 2024 farmers’ protest (which is curiously minimised here, given that he ended up as the face of it). During these times, we basically end up following him around like a Kardashian. Clearly there is a market for this sort of thing – you can’t transform a pub into a heaving cult of personality if nobody’s interested in you as a person – but it does make you miss the actual farming.

Especially when the actual farming stuff is so well made. The joy of Clarkson’s Farm is that Clarkson is such an effective communicator that you find yourself swept up in his interests. Unlike Countryfile, which offers rose-tinted sentimentality as a default, there’s always something slightly thrilling about the sight of Clarkson encountering the quirks of modern agriculture. There’s a bit here where he gets someone to perform a postmortem on a dead sheep that is fascinating and disgusting in equal measure.

By far the most satisfying parts of the show come when Clarkson stops mucking around and actually treats farming as a subject worthy of his time. A lot of this series is devoted to the modernisation necessary to keep farming profitable, and his pursuit of this takes him to some extraordinary places. He meets a potato farmer in the Netherlands who has optimised every aspect of his farm – even getting it designated as an airport to better facilitate targeted drone-based pesticide use – to cut costs and increase output.

This is absurdly nerdy stuff, all heat maps and soil analysis and granular data, and by rights it should be as dull as ditchwater. If the show was called Random Dutch Potato-Grower’s Farm, it would be lucky to get a handful of viewers. But Clarkson’s enthusiasm for it – his intense curiosity and schoolboyish glee – really sells it. And when he ends up adopting it wholesale, we find ourselves back where we were when the show began, with a guy eager to learn more about something alien to him. This is Clarkson’s Farm doing its job, and when it does it like this, there’s really nothing better.

The issue is that there isn’t nearly enough of it. As things stand, Clarkson is now a man with his own gravitational pull. But Clarkson’s Farm works best when it forgets all the distractions and remembers to get its fingernails dirty. A little more of that would go a very long way.