The great chain of being Jeremy Clarkson
Andrew Bernard
For now, the future of Clarkson’s Farm (and The Grand Tour) seems unclear. Variety reported after the Sun column fiasco that Amazon was “likely” to part ways with Jeremy Clarkson after they’d finished airing episodes the streaming giant has already purchased. That would mean we’d continue to see Clarkson on Prime through at least 2024. Hopefully by then, Amazon will realize that they have two of the best shows on TV and that the Markle-Mountbatten-Saxe-Coburg-Gothas are working for Netflix.
The second season of Clarkson’s Farm, a docuseries now out on Amazon Prime, raises the question of what happens when a member of the upstart fourth estate tries to join the second. “You’re not a farmer; you’re a media personality,” a villager shouts at the eponymous Clarkson at a zoning meeting.
Power dynamics on a farm were a lot clearer under feudalism. The peasants answered to the nobility who answered to God and his clergy. And then the press was invented. Clarkson is certainly a media personality, and a big one at that in the United Kingdom. He is the host of the U.K. edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He has a column in the Sun, one of the U.K.’s largest tabloids, and another couple of columns in the Times of London, its largest “quality” paper. That’s on top of his now irregular co-hosting duties on automotive show The Grand Tour with his fellow exiles from the BBC’s Top Gear, which was for a time the most popular factual television show in the world before Clarkson was booted for punching a producer in a dispute over catering in 2015.
The first season of Clarkson’s Farm proved that while he certainly was farming, he wasn’t much of a farmer. We see Clarkson plowing fields poorly, building fences poorly, and getting covered in sheep afterbirth about as well as anyone can handle that particular indignity. If you imagine all of the activities described in Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” speech as performed by a fat, middle-aged, often inebriated comedian pratfalling in the countryside, you’ll about get the picture.
The first season worked because it turns out that’s an awful lot of fun to watch, particularly when it’s done by someone with a virtually unlimited budget and a 7-year-old boy’s enthusiasm for big machines that move dirt around.
It also worked because — it’s always odd to speak of real people this way — he found a fantastic set of sympathetic rural characters. The breakout star of that season was Kaleb Cooper, the hypercompetent Generation Z farmhand who plays the straight man in the face of Clarkson’s constant innuendos and who somehow makes the supposedly arch-reactionary seem like a liberal cosmopolite.
“He was born in Oxford!” Kaleb earnestly says about calling his baby “foreign” after a ribbing from his older counterpart. “I was born in Chipping Norton, as well as all my family. And my son is born in Oxford. He’s foreign.” (The two are about 20 miles apart.)
For all his efforts in the first year, Clarkson’s profits amounted to roughly $173 for his entire 1,000-acre farm. With Brexit potentially ending the farm subsidies that made even that piddling sum possible, Clarkson’s big idea for profits in the second season is to open a steak restaurant with everything grown at the same farm where it’s served.
As in the first season, the earthy, uncensored reality of husbandry is somehow funny, horrifying, and profound all at the same time. It turns out that the bovine version of the miracle of life involves a winch cable. But as enjoyable as it is to see a city slicker walk into a farming supply store and make faces at products labeled “bloodless castrators for mature animals” and “teatwipes,” this would all risk becoming mere schtick were it not for the surprisingly intense legal drama over planning permission for the restaurant.
Which brings me back to power dynamics. The residents and councilors of West Oxfordshire clearly believe that Clarkson is a powerful interloper destroying the natural beauty of the area. And the patrons of his farm shop are, admittedly, turning the roads to mud.
The councilors seem to believe any means are justified to put his plans to an end, and so they not only deny his restaurant but prevent him from building a parking lot to solve the mud problem. And they install more than a mile of high visibility cones on either side of his farm entrance to prevent people parking on the verge. So much for the “natural beauty” Clarkson’s enemies say they’re worried about preserving.
If the show has a politics, it’s somewhere between YIMBYism and an anarcho-libertarian impulse to burn down the administrative state. “We’re gonna have to live in a murky gray area of loopholes and cunning wheezes,” Clarkson says to his girlfriend of their efforts to avoid the local council’s restrictions. “It’s going to be very murky and very gray where we’re going to be living, but we have to stay just within the right side.”
While I’m sure American farmers face federal, state, and local regulatory insanities, the show made me glad that our forefathers cast off the yoke of British monarchy. All the more so because while the local councilors may be the greatest threat to Clarkson’s farm, the greatest threat to Clarkson’s Farm the TV show is an article he wrote about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in December.
“We all know in our heart of hearts that Harold Markle is a slightly dim but fun-loving chin who flew Apache helicopter gunships in Afghanistan and cavorted around Las Vegas hotel rooms with naked hookers,” Clarkson’s column opened. “But then along came Meghan, who obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.” Clarkson proceeded to say that he hated Meghan “on a cellular level.”
“At night,” he wrote, “I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”
The U.K.’s Independent Press Standards Organisation received a record 17,500 complaints about the column, which Clarkson asked his own paper to retract. He then issued a public apology.
Clarkson has written at least a couple of columns a week, every week, for decades, and in this case, he wrote one that wasn’t funny. As a writer, there but for the grace of God go I. As a humorist, he shouldn’t have relied on a reference to a high-concept fantasy show that ended in the previous decade, and as a resident of the 21st century, he should not have used the idiom “on a cellular level” to refer to his hatred of a black woman. His apology acknowledged that he crossed a line, and unlike so many recent hostage letters disguised as apologies, he seemed sincere.
In rejecting his apology, Markle and Mountbatten-Windsor (or whatever their last names are now that they live in California) seemed to be citing power dynamics in arguing that the problem wasn’t what he’d said about Meghan but that he had said such a thing about a woman. “What remains to be addressed is his longstanding pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny,” they wrote in a statement. “Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry’, as he states, it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”
While they don’t cite any other such pieces, this is awfully rich coming from a couple one of whom published in his memoir that a female British journalist was “an infected pustule on the arse of humanity.” (That this description is true of journalists as a class is no defense.)
Andrew Bernard is the Washington correspondent for the Algemeiner.