Five series in, the fatal flaw at the heart of Clarkson's Farm has become unignorable: it is meant to be a show about failure, about an oafish man wading into an industry he knows little about and mucking everything up. But in real life, the show has become so successful that Jeremy Clarkson has essentially colonised the Cotswolds in his image. His Farmer's Dog pub is such an attraction that a nearby field had to be turned into a 360-space car park, and his Diddly Squat farm shop is a souvenir emporium selling branded hats, cufflinks, and honey jars with his face. His Hawkstone beer brand reported sales of £21.3m in the year to March 2025, with a stated goal of putting Peroni out of business.
This success makes Clarkson's mannered clumsiness harder to take. If the point of the show is to highlight the difficulties of farming, yet his biggest gripe is the number of pint glasses tourists steal from his pub, that is a difficult structural flaw to overcome. The new series attempts to address this by leaning into reality show elements, opening with iPhone footage of Clarkson in hospital with chest pains. He reveals he was days away from a catastrophic heart attack, and much of the series follows him on weight-loss jabs, eating yoghurt, and resting—essentially following him around like a Kardashian.
While there is clearly a market for this personality cult, it makes you miss the actual farming. The farming content remains well-made, with Clarkson as an effective communicator who sweeps viewers up in his interests. Unlike Countryfile's rose-tinted sentimentality, there is something thrilling about Clarkson encountering modern agriculture's quirks, such as a postmortem on a dead sheep that is both fascinating and disgusting.
The most satisfying parts come when Clarkson treats farming as a subject worthy of his time. This series devotes significant attention to the modernisation necessary to keep farming profitable. He meets a potato farmer in the Netherlands who has optimised every aspect of his farm—even getting it designated as an airport for targeted drone-based pesticide use—to cut costs and increase output. Clarkson's enthusiasm for this nerdy stuff, full of heat maps and soil analysis, really sells it.
However, there is not nearly enough of this. Clarkson is now a man with his own gravitational pull, but the show works best when it forgets distractions and gets its fingernails dirty. A little more of that would go a very long way.
