A prominent farmer and author has claimed Jeremy Clarkson’s reality TV series Clarkson’s Farm has been embraced by the farming community.
James Rebanks, a sheep farmer and the prize-winning author of The Shepherd’s Life, favourably contrasted the series with the long-running BBC nature series Countryfile.
During an appearance at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Rebanks was asked what effect the series had had on farming’s reputation.
“I can report back from within the farming community: they all loved [Clarkson’s Farm]. They loved it,” he said, per The Telegraph. “Ok, he’s clowning around and he plays to that audience, and a lot of farmers are lads that like machines and they would have watched Top Gear and all the rest of it.
“But what they really liked is [that] they have been frankly pissed off with Countryfile for about 30 years because the whole logic of Countryfile is that you can’t make a mainstream, prime-time TV programme about farming because farming is for a niche group of idiots. And what Clarkson has come along and done is gone, ‘Actually, no, everybody will watch a programme about farming, you just need to do it in a certain way.’”
He added that Clarkson was able to get people to “spend 10 to 15 minutes thinking about farm economics”, and that despite the presence of some “silly bits”, the farming community was “delighted” that a “high profile” figure would “stick up for them or have any kind of genuine empathy”.
The series was praised earlier this year by The Independent’s Ed Cumming, who described Clarkson’s Farm as “eight hours of informative, often hilarious viewing that shows a side of England often hidden from view”.
Clarkson’s Farm can be viewed on Amazon Prime Video now.
