11/13/2022 0 Comments The grand tour season 5![]() ![]() You spend 30 years blowing everything up” – this included his own farmhouse in a 2016 episode of The Grand Tour – “then make this rather gentle programme with some lovely people from a village. With The Grand Tour now appearing only as specials, and his agricultural adventure now filming its second series, is the farm Clarkson’s retirement plan? “No. You’d have thought with all the exercise I’d look like a whippet.” I don’t listen to the rest – drink less, lose weight. You sit there thinking, Have I got cancer? That’s all I care about. Then a doctor summons you into this dimly lit surgery to look at your results. They begin with a prostate exam and it gets more undignified as the day goes on. How’s his health now? “I’ve got my first medical for two and half years next week – the full anus – and I’m terrified. It’s like David Attenborough doing a programme on jet-skiingĬlarkson found himself in hospital with pneumonia in 2017 and, last Christmas, feared he would “die alone in a plastic tent” after contracting Covid. You spend 30 years blowing everything up, then make this rather gentle programme with some lovely people from a village. “No blue plaque,” he agrees with a laugh, “but I’ll be on Dave.” In 40 years I shall be dead and nobody shall remember me.” Although some channel will probably still be showing Top Gear repeats, I suggest. When my dad died at 61 I thought, That’s a pretty good innings. When I ask how he hopes to die, he pops a piece of Nicorette in his mouth and says: “I used to think I’d put out my last cigarette age 107 and just die. Better yet, he isn’t the in-your-face alpha of this show, because everyone else knows so much more than him.” However, in her one-star review, Heritage’s colleague Lucy Mangan called the show, which she renamed Jeremy Buys a Tractor, “wearisome, meretricious rubbish”.Ĭlarkson is 61 now. “Unlike his motoring shows,” wrote Stuart Heritage in the Guardian, “where his stock reaction to any problem was to blast out of it in an orgy of explosive cluelessness, the Clarkson we meet here is actively willing to learn. I don’t know how farmers walk about.”Ĭlarkson’s Farm split the critics. “I’ve even bought a check shirt and a pair of steel-toed boots, which are incredibly heavy. Then they say, ‘He’s stupid.’ So it’s easier not to bother.” But there is a reason why I’m sitting in front of this mud-splattered figure: he’s got a book out, a collection of his newspaper columns on farming. So I’m in deep s**t.” But there has, inevitably, been criticism from Clarksonphobes, whose existence he acknowledges with the words: “A lot of people don’t like cars, or me, and certainly don’t like the combination of the two.”Ĭlarkson doesn’t grant many interviews. “I hit a telegraph pole with a very expensive piece of borrowed equipment. “I had the most awful accident last week,” he says at one point. “Now I know what’s in them all.”Ĭlarkson’s Farm has delighted Clarksonphiles by showing TV’s leading boor/buffoon utterly out of his comfort zone and sinking fast. “I didn’t have a clue what was growing in my fields,” he says, gesturing all around. In his most recent Amazon venture, Clarkson’s Farm, he attempts to cultivate the 1,000ac of land he’s owned since 2008 but didn’t give an agricultural hoot about until the actual farmer who worked them retired, in 2019. I look like a farmer. I’ve even bought a check shirt and a pair of steel-toed boots, which are incredibly heavy. Since leaving the BBC’s Top Gear in 2015, he has cohosted four series of The Grand Tour (basically Top Gear with 300 times the budget) on Amazon Prime Video. Your understanding of why badgers, and the leanings of Boris Johnson’s wife, have got Clarkson’s Levi’s in a twist may depend on how far along his career you’ve travelled. Carrie Johnson is a badger enthusiast, so the government aren’t likely to do anything while she’s running around.” But if you say, ‘I’m going to shoot a badger,’ you can expect to find your house on fire within 10 minutes. A quarter of the world’s badgers live in the UK, causing chaos. “If they’ve got TB and a cow eats that bit of grass, then you, the taxpayer, pay for that cow to be killed. ![]() Over early-morning coffee at his farmhouse in Oxfordshire, in southern England, Jeremy Clarkson is talking about his new nemesis, badgers, and the fact that they constantly urinate, usually on his grass. ![]()
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