Clarkson’s Farm has landed back on our screens with a bang. And eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed one immediate difference: among all the bucolic shots of the British countryside, Kaleb Cooper has been replaced (temporarily) with fellow farmer Harriet Cowan.
There’s one particular scene that stands out in the early episodes.
“That's a neolithic fort,” Jeremy Clarkson says at one point, whilst driving Harriet through the rolling countryside.
“What's a neolithic?” she responds, tapping away on her phone.
Clarkson responds with incredulity; she responds with Gen Z-style boredom. This is after their conversation where she insists that she doesn’t know who Lenny Henry is – or at least, brands him as “the bed man. Lenny Henry, he does the bed advert, don't he?"
Yes, we get it. At moments like these, it feels like the show is laughing at Harriet more than with her – and it also seems like she’s trying too hard to fill the boots left by that other grumpy, no-nonsense farmer, Kaleb.
This is a problem, because Clarkson’s Farm is a show that thrives on the supposed fly-on-the-wall element of watching Clarkson and his gang of farm hands go about their daily lives.
Clarkson himself has always excelled at walking the fine line between filming hitting TV beats and making those moments appear as natural as possible. He’s been doing it for years – Top Gear offered exactly the same formula, with hosts Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond bantering about this or that before something ‘just happened’ to go wrong.
Is the show scripted? The cast and crew have rebutted this before. In a chat with Australian show The Country Hour, Kaleb explained that "they normally say 'Is it all real?' and I go '100 per cent'. I don't know how they think it's not real, I'm not an actor, I don't go up there and act, I am myself."
“It isn't created or written or planned,” Clarkson added on Twitter. “The cameras just film us doing stuff."
That’s all well and good, but even if they’re not following a script, there are certainly moments that do feel contrived – and in this season, increasingly so.
Harriet’s deadpan delivery and eagerness to mimic Kaleb (at least, in the show’s earlier episodes) smacks of a thorough casting process by the show’s producers. County councils, buoyed by Clarkson’s fame, are practically falling over themselves to invite cameras into the meeting rooms and tell Clarkson how keen they are to work with him.
Continual smash-cuts to Kaleb lording it over adoring audiences around the country drive the point home. This show isn’t an unknown quantity anymore, or an underdog story about watching a bumbling TV presenter try and make a living from the land. It’s a star-making vehicle.
Deprived of its former purpose (Clarkson has successfully proved himself a farmer: where can we go from here?), the show’s hunt for storylines feels especially obvious this season. Whereas previous years focused on Clarkson’s attempts to find and breed pigs, say, or start a mushroom-harvesting business (and almost gassing himself on the spores), this season has often felt like it’s been grabbing for ideas it can riff off.
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While the pub is a successful example of this – it gets us off the farm, which has become too familiar in the last few years – Clarkson’s hunt for, say, a tractor, feels less so. That particular idea culminates in a fever-dream sequence in which he gets eight tractors (complete with baffled but eager sales reps) to line up and ‘perform’ for him.
With Harriet and (presumably) the Clarkson’s Farm team standing by with a stopwatch, the tractors are all told to get their tow hitch out as fast as possible.
Watching that happen, intercut with Top Gear-esque breakdowns of each tractors’ statistics, feels forced – like the gang are attempting to whip up drama out of nothing – and vaguely uncomfortable. Yes, the farmers are in on it, but it still feels like Clarkson is using his celebrity as an excuse to make people clap like trained monkeys.
There’s still plenty of mileage left in the show, of course. It knows its business and does it well; there’s still nothing else like it on television, especially when it comes to portraying the realities of farming life. But the joins are starting to show, and the wheels are starting to creak slightly. Next season, can we can the tractor races?
Clarkson’s Farm Season 4 is streaming now on Prime Video
