On The Popularity Of Clarkson's Farm

Why such a humble show can scalp the biggest franchises

There’s a scene in the first series of Clarkson’s Farm, which I’ve just watched, in which Jeremy Clarkson’s sheep are shorn after displaying some rather off behaviour. Under the baking sun of 2020’s weirdly long heatwave, the animals have their inches-thick woolen blankets sheared, allowing their pinky-white bodies to be liberated from their suffocating coats and to feel the soft air once more on their skin. They leap, dance, and galavant across Chipping Norton’s lush greenery in a joyous celebration of liberation and life. As I watched it, a thought came to me: we’re all those sheep, and modern entertainment is the thick layer of smothering torment.

On paper, Clarkson’s Farm doesn’t have a lot going for it. A wealthy TV personality (widely disliked by Britain’s liberal intelligentsia) decides to hang out on the 1000-acre farm he bought in a well-heeled corner of bucolic English countryside, and we plebs are expecting to be invested? Yet, it is precisely the spectacular popularity of the show that reveals something about our current moment in the 2020s. Namely, the public yearns for authenticity, real people, natural settings, and reification of an England thought lost.

Amazon, which also carries the show, carries another show called Rings Of Power, which is rumoured to have set Amazon back an eye-watering billion dollars. Yet the show about a 60-year-old white man struggling to comprehend barley moisture regulations beats it in the ratings.

Clarkson’s warm, though curmudgeonly persona has a nigh-on infinite degree of resonance and connection. Clarkson, like Nigel Farage (unfortunately), is coded in the average British psyche as “friend” and not “enemy” in the Schmittian sense. He likes a pint in the pub, he swears, he makes politically incorrect quips and jibes, and we get the feeling that he “gets it”. Clarkson feels like an old friend, unlike the blank, interchangeable drones that the entertainment force feeds the viewing public incessantly. When Clarkson chooses his tractor, he opts for a ridiculously oversized Lamborghini with German text in the computer displays. It’s Jeremy Clarkson; we expect nothing else. This allows the quirky cast of regular characters to lambast Clarkson for choosing such an impractical and expensive vehicle, scolding him like a boy.

This brings us to the show's mechanics and wider cast. When trying to understand why a piece of media succeeds while so much (almost everything) fails these days, it is tempting to merely reduce it to being “natural” or not woke. However, Clarkson’s Farm has a structure and narrative with different characters in their supporting roles. If we break down and investigate the dynamics of Clarkson’s Farm more closely, the characters map nicely onto archetypes found throughout fiction and storytelling.

Jeremy Clarkson: The veteran television presenter has returned to the farm he bought many years ago, intending to run it and make it a viable business. He is wealthy but has no idea how to run a farm. Thus, he inhabits the “Lord of the Manor” and “Fish out of Water” archetypes. Given that most of the audience are not adept farmers, we identify with his perspective and learn as he learns.

Lisa Hogan: Clarkson’s girlfriend and woman. Hogan brings a degree of glamour and sophistication to the proceedings, adding a genteel personality as “the Lady of the Manor”. While not superseding Clarkson himself as the ultimate authority on the farm, Hogan can chastise him and rein in some of his more outlandish schemes and capers.

Caleb Cooper (to Clarkson’s right): Caleb is a local lad who seemingly knows nothing of the wider world, but in terms of the practicalities of farm work, the essential hard graft of fencing, repairing, pumping water, and forming on-the-spot solutions to complex problems, he is worth his weight in gold. Caleb, then, is Clarkson’s sidekick, what in the days of the British Empire would be an officer’s “batman”. His status as an indispensable problem solver and loyal worker allows him to back-chat and argue with Clarkson, almost always being proven correct in the long term.

Charlie Ireland (far left): The sarcastically named “Cheerful Charlie” is Clarkson’s land management agent. Charlie’s persona is devoid of charisma and represents the number-crunching bureaucrat who arrives to dampen Clarkson’s spirits by outlining the endless regulatory blocks and absurd laws inherent in modern farming. Where Lisa Hogan can rein in Clarkson on a personal level, Charlie can do so by invoking a still higher authority: the British State. Charlie is not antagonistic to Clarkson; if anything, he wants to protect him from the talons of the managerial leviathan. However, in Charlie, we see the appearance of an ancient English trope: the right of an Englishman to do whatever he likes on his property without the government sticking its beak in. Charlie is there to remind Clarkson that, for example, the modern British state can use satellites and drones to count exactly how many grains of barley he “actually” has per square acre.

Gerald Cooper (far right): With his impenetrable West Country accent and 1980s mullet hairdo, Gerald is a signifier of “the man of the land”. Gerald reminds us of Pathé video reels depicting men drinking bitter in quiet English villages. His role on the farm is “security” and maintaining the 42 miles of stone walls snaking through and around Clarkson’s land. He’s a sprightly 72-year-old and has been farming there for 50 years. To us moderns, he’s coded as archaic, as if he has been stuck down a mineshaft somewhere for a hundred years only to re-emerge in an age of iPhones, social media, and Clown World.

With our cast of characters in place, each of whom we can relate to and sympathise with in our own way, we can embark on the story arcs and narrative structures of the typical Clarkson’s Farm episode. It may surprise people to learn that “reality television” of this nature could have a story-telling structure, but thanks to some very clever framing and editing, it does.

In episode 4, Wilding, Clarkson comes up with the idea of returning some of his land back to nature after lamenting the loss of insects in recent decades. He drives his oversized Lamborghini tractor to a stream churning up the land and destroying much topsoil. Charlie then explains that the environmental regulations will throw a fit at this. Next, the dam he builds fails, and leaking water exacerbates the problem of ruining the soil. His tractor and equipment become stuck. Lisa Hogan then arrives, asks what the hell is going on, and excoriates him for his stupid ideas and the path of destruction he has left. Clarkson then calls Caleb to bring his tractor to pull him out, but he gets stuck too, so he calls his brother to pull out his tractor attached to Clarkson’s tractor, which is connected to another smaller vehicle.

Eventually, as night spreads across the land, everything is pulled out and makes it to the bank's top, out of the quagmire. The following morning Clarkson and Lisa return to the would-be pond, create a more or less functional dam and release some trout. Meanwhile, Clarkson instructs Caleb to clean up all the mess and wrecked topsoil.

Thus, the show follows a traditional storytelling formula. The goal is introduced, then thrown into doubt, and the problems increase further. The characters all perform their allotted roles, and the threads and goals are neatly concluded by the time the episode ends. Everything is in its right place.

In the 1990s or ‘80s, Clarkson’s Farm would have occupied a slot on a secondary channel such as BBC 2 or Channel Four, as did Clarkson’s Top Gear. It would have had a dedicated but niche audience of people drawn to quirky characters and the countryside, as well as Clarkson himself. In the 2020s, however, entertainment has become so barren, dumb, and offensive to normal people that Clarkson’s Farm is able to compete head-to-head with the largest flagship productions backed by gargantuan budgets. As many people have pointed out, Clarkson’s Farm is closer in spirit to Tolkien than Rings of Power, not merely because of its rural, back-to-the-earth aesthetic, but, I would argue, in its implicit understanding of human archetypes and catharsis. It allows us to identify with relatable characters.

While I’m hesitant to push the analogy too far, in Clarkson’s Farm, the British State, and its endless regulatory reach and intrusion become akin to the ever-watching eye of Sauron, thus forming a central antagonist forever threatening our character’s dreams, goals, and aspirations. Conversely, so much modern media seems to view its audience as the antagonists to itself! It exists to lecture, insult, berate, and subvert — it exists as an adjunct of a system that seeks to impose its will upon you rather than a conduit through which you can be uplifted, educated in a genuine sense, and nod in tacit agreement at the frustrations of modern life we’re beholden to.

In our politically saturated media complex, with our attention spans dwindling under the algorithm's force, it is lovely to see people in wellies arguing over how to erect a fence post in mud. It reminds us of the before times; it is a crack in the superstructure illuminating the paucity of the world around us but also telling us that, more often than not, the answer to the cacophony of politics and narratives often lies in the mundane and relatable.

In our drought of authenticity, we scamper to the form that offers us at least a dribble of what once was, and to our surprise, we gleefully realise it was there all along…