One of streaming TV’s most popular “reality” series returns for a fourth season of plowing, planting, impregnating and shipping off to slaughter in “Clarkson’s Farm 4,” the British show about celebrity TV motoring reviewer/presenter Jeremy Clarkson‘s transition to gentleman farming.
A blockbuster series for Amazon that premiered at the tail end of COVID, it’s been a comical and eye-opening documentary about the grueling routines and never-ending threats to farming and one arrogant, impatient and mechanically inept “gentleman” who takes it on, late in life.
The series is an appealing blend of escapism — going “back to the land,” with the steep learning curve that portends — coupled with the ominous threats to farming as a way of life and a business, and celebrity.
Yes, it’s all about the now-climate-changed weather. And no, there’s not much anyone can do about it, “Greta Thunberg” shots be damned.
Clarkson makes a garulous, self-effacing tour-guide for the reality of this life — cocksure he can figure out every farmer’s best friend — a new work “shortcut,” or fresh angles, crop and money/time/livestock-saving devices.
With eyerolls from his young, farm-born farm manager Kaleb Cooper, farm planner/accountant Charlie Ireland and significant other Lisa Hogan, Clarkson’s tried to turn goats into a farm brambles-clearing business, attempted to break into the horse radish/wasabi market and grow giant mushrooms as a bottom-line-saving delicacy.
Longtime fans of Clarkson’s “Top Gear” and “Grand Tour” TV series are treated to his clumsy attempts at mastering the vast array of motorized vehicles on the thousand acre farm he’s named Diddley Squat. His weakness for complicated, “sexy,” overpowered and break-down prone Italian cars is reflected in his love of Lamborghini tractors.
And his celebrity means that he is able to directly market much of what he produces — from grains turned into his signature beer, Hawkstone, to potatoes, beef and mushrooms et al sold in a wildly popular, TV-plugged and celebrity-labeled farm store, which has been a headache for him and Chipping-Norton village neighbors and Oxfordshire council members and planners.
That store and the vicisitudes of Britain’s notoriously damp and climate-changed weather remain ongoing gripes of Season Four of the series, which opens with Clarkson coping with the celebrity he’s bestowed on his cherubic, practical and increasingly outspoken and famous employee Kaleb. Cooper got his own British farm-and-performance hall tour and Amazon special (“The World According to Kaleb: On Tour,” goofy and offhandedly charming) and when “Farm 4” begins, he’s not around.
That leads to Clarkson hiring a young woman, Harriet Cowan, who is both an impressively skilled farmer and a Tik Tok influencer. She’s dolled-up, hair blown-out and eyelashes added for her music videos set to the mundane work of tractoring, with implied feminist empowerment in showing her doing all the work the menfolk do.
Clarkson? He’s well-over 60, struggling with the work, health issues and unruly eyebrows even as he trots out his favorite phrase.
“I’ve had a brilliant idea.”
There are new crops attempted, new land preservation and land management issues owing to ever-shifting government “schemes” and now-changing governments.
Clarkson decides to use his celebrity to try and open a pub, attempting an end-run around “the planning police” of Oxfordshire, who reflected community resistance to all the fan-traffic that flood his farm store there. Why not try to open a pub/restaurant/butcher shop/store in the more tourism-friendly Cotswalds, then?
“Farm 4” thus takes on elements of the property-hunt series “Escape to the Country” as Clarkson & Co. note the collapse of “the village pub” — with a thousand of them closing a year over recent decades. There’s plenty of empty and historic pubs to choose from, and some lip service is paid to at least the governmental side of why so many fail or are not “allowed” to succeed — not too much — thanks to traffic, “quiet” and quality of life localism and regulations.
The series also touches on threats to small-scale farming such as a loss of local abattoirs for livestock slaughter, the rising age of the average farmer and the “loneliness” of an important profession that is all grinding routine, physical hazards and limited rewards.
On both sides of the pond, the opportunity-lacking countryside is emptying out as young people leave and an increasingly narrow, older and conservative demographic remains and recklessly votes itself into oblivion.
In the years since “Clarkson’s Farm” premiered, I’ve moved back to the rural Virginia county where I grew up and onto a farm. That’s given me fresh appreciations for this “Green Acres meets the Kardashians” concept, and of how this series attempts a balance of “scripted” bits and the simple, solitary and grueling reality of farming life.
I need to water, move water, (organically) spray apple trees, stake tomato plants, wrangle unruly farm dogs and feed chickens after I finish this review. Clarkson’s endless “What day is this?” isn’t just about the forgetfulness of age. Every day has its long list of chores, repairs, planting or harvesting prep and animal care, and that goes on even though there isn’t a film crew or a mania for “sharing” the life and work via cellphone videos. The days all run together.
Am I writing this on Sunday? Memorial Day?
The “celebrity” side of things means Clarkson can name drop like a chat show host, model a nifty cap he got from Woody Harrelson, open a “celebrity” pub like his “Grand Tour” mate James May, and command attention wherever he goes. Realtors line up to show him pubs and council members either relish the camera attention of meeting with him over his “planned improvements,” or shun camera and him in part just to put this interloper/poseur in his place.
So there are new wrinkles in the fourth season of “Clarkson’s Farm,” but no novel themes or real new challenges aside from the health scare. It’s pleasantly more of the same, more Clarkson cunning “plans,” more ridicule from one fresh face and a lot of more familiar ones.
There are a lot more “Feckin’ eejit” cracks from his just-as-farm-naive Irish TV lady friend Lisa.
Clarkson and his longtime “Top Gear” and beyond producer Andy Wilmon know where the laughs are in all the tractor confusion and mishaps, and can command a legion of tractor salesmen to show up so that Clarkson can make a TV-friendly “bit” pointing to an informed and practical decision about whether to go with a Holland, John Deere, Massey Ferguson or Case International Harvestor to work his farm.
And they know the laughs will always come from the pretentious bloke his colleagues nicknamed “Orangutan” making the flashiest and most impractically Italian choice possible. Again. The feckin’ eejit.
Rating: TV-16+, profanity, alcohol consumption
Cast: Jeremy Clarkson, Kaleb Cooper, Lisa Hogan, Charlie Ireland, Gerald Cooper, Dilwyn Evans, Alan Townsend and Harriet Cowan
Credits: Created by Andy Wilmon. An Amazon Prime release.
Running time: eight episodes @:39-:51 minutes each
