As the sun rises on a new season of Clarkson’s Farm, Jeremy Clarkson is feeling sorry for himself. The success of his Prime Video show, which has documented the former Top Gear host’s efforts to run Diddly Squat Farm in the Cotswolds since 2021, has had a major side effect: turning his gilet-loving assistant Kaleb Cooper into a star in his own right.
And so the affable farm hand has embarked on a national tour to promote his latest book, leaving his far less competent boss in charge of the day-to-day running of Diddly Squat. Cue a lot of morose shots of Clarkson standing in fields sighing or engaging in futile arguments with his pigs. While Kaleb is leading a crowd in a mass singalong of – you guessed it – “I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester”, Clarkson is quite literally “shovelling s***”. It’s like an agricultural Freaky Friday.
It’s clear that things can’t continue this way for long. After all, there are crops to be sown, planning permission battles to be fought, and 2.5 tonnes of bird feed to be disposed of, after bags of it seem to magically materialise in one of Clarkson’s barns. Plus, watching Clarkson moan to himself is a bit like looking on as someone bounces a tennis ball against a wall – it’d be a lot more entertaining if they actually had another person to volley back and forth with. Enter Harriet Cowan.
Twenty-four-year-old Harriet is the young farmer who is recruited by the eminently sensible land agent Charlie to help save Clarkson from his own uselessness. She’s a Gen Z TikTok star with more than 38k followers (although that number will surely skyrocket once people see new series). She posts lip syncs from her tractor. She performs dance routines next to hay bales. On paper, then, she seems exactly like the sort of Gen Z construct precision engineered to annoy the curmudgeonly Clarkson. But while she is certainly the perfect foil for him, it doesn’t take long at all for her to earn his respect (and the viewers’ approval).
As soon as she meets her new employer, Harriet, a nurse who grew up mucking in on her family’s farm in Derbyshire, makes it clear that she is far too sensible to get caught up in any of Clarkson’s pontificating or posturing. Has she watched the show before? No, but she has seen compilation videos of various gaffes (clearly, they didn’t put her off too much).
Soon she is telling him off for his poor management of the hedges that line his fields, pointing out that the squeaky cow brush needs a dose of WD40 and deadpanning one-liners when Clarkson points out a neolithic fort (“almost as old as you”). And when his ancient Lamborghini tractor (practically neolithic itself, surely) starts conking out, she’s on the case. “Those eyelashes and what she’s doing don’t necessarily go together, do they?” Clarkson ponders as Harriet – a false lash devotee – vigorously boots the front of a farming vehicle to try and fix yet another problem. He’s about to learn an important life lesson – women who can properly apply false eyelashes tend to be pretty much indomitable (see also: girls who can do French plaits).
@harrietcowan3 I can’t wait for summer and cows to be out 😇 #country #matbro #fyp #foryou #viraltiktok #womeninagriculture #countrygirl #farmlife #tractor #agriculture #farmer #cows
♬ LoveHate Thing (Sped Up Version) - Wale
While the presenter manages to turn the smallest of farmyard tasks into a saga worthy of an epic poem, Harriet remains unflappable, with an enviable work ethic and productivity rate: she manages to “work like a Trojan”, as Clarkson puts it, ticking off everything on the Diddly Squat to-do list and still having time to document her days for her followers, much to her new employer’s bafflement. There’s an inevitable but still fun scene where he and Charlie can be seen squinting into a phone, attempting to understand exactly what happens on her TikTok account before concluding that they are much too old for such things.
If the producers intended for Harriet and Clarkson to end up on a generational collision course, that plan clearly backfired – but the accord that emerges between them is much more entertaining, and elicits unexpected reactions from the latter, too. A chat about #farmtok ends up segueing into a forthright conversation about the mental health challenges that farmers face, thanks to the isolation, long hours and pervasive sense of uncertainty. Clarkson is, of course, not exactly known as a beacon of empathy and sensitivity, but he goes against expectation and engages properly with Harriet’s comments (over the past year, he’s launched initiatives around this issue too).
Inevitably, once Harriet’s involvement in series four was confirmed, a whole clutch of headlines branded her as Clarkson’s “glamorous new farmhand”, and other variations on that theme. God forbid you have nice hair while using a seed drill. Aside from Clarkson’s remark about the eyelashes, though, which is delivered with more of a bemused dad vibe than anything mocking, the show mercifully avoids leaning into that whole trope. Instead it allows Harriet to shine on her own straightforward, no-nonsense terms.
The only downside for Clarkson, of course, is that, once again, the assistant’s star might eclipse the boss’s. Who knows, by the time the next season’s out, she might be surfing a Kaleb-style wave of success of her very own. Great for her TikTok collabs, less so for Clarkson’s harvest schedule.
‘Clarkson’s Farm’ season four is out now on Prime Video
