3 May 2024

Clarkson’s Farm

A decade ago, Jeremy Clarkson was asked when he last cried. “My name is Jeremy,” he replied. “That makes me a man, and that means I don’t snivel.” But that was before his farming days, says Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. In series three of Clarkson’s Farm, the former Top Gear presenter gets some adorable piglets – and quickly learns that pig farming can be a “heartbreaking business”. As he laments to the butcher: “All farmers love their animals, and then they kill them.” The pig rearing is part of a challenge Clarkson sets at the start of the series: he’ll try to make money from the 500 “unfarmed” acres of his Cotswolds estate – the woodland and hedgerows, basically – while his trusty sidekick Kaleb Cooper takes charge of the arable land. They have 12 months to see who makes the most profit.

One of the best things about this show – which broke Amazon Prime’s viewing records last series – is Clarkson’s “complete lack of self-consciousness”, says Vicky Jessop in the Evening Standard. Whether he’s using a Henry the Hoover to suck blackberries off a hedgerow, or putting up a pig-pen back to front, he’s “game for pretty much anything”. But while there’s plenty of stupidity, there’s a lot of heart, too. Clarkson and his support team – Kaleb, girlfriend Lisa, land agent Charlie, and others – are refreshingly honest about the challenges of farming. So yes, this is “more of the same”, and with another season already in the pipeline there’s more to come yet. “But gosh dang, isn’t it enjoyable.”

The first four episodes of Clarkson’s Farm are available on Amazon Prime Video now; the remainder air on 10 May.

Civilisation

First broadcast in 1969, Kenneth Clark’s magisterial guide through Western art, architecture and philosophy is returning to the BBC for the first time in a decade. I first watched the 13-part epic during lockdown, says William Atkinson in The Spectator, and found it “the perfect guide for a cultural novice”. From Chartres to Constable, Bruni to Beethoven, Clark’s “sweeping grasp is as much a masterpiece as any of his chosen subjects”. It’s a shame the BBC has placed the series on its website alongside a new segment by Mary Beard lamenting its “Euro-centrism”. It’s obviously true that a history of art that doesn’t venture south of the Pyrenees “cannot claim to be comprehensive”, but Clark never intended to be. He was merely trying to bring “the delights of the Western canon to the telly-watching masses”. On that metric, Civilisation was, and is, “a total triumph”.

Civilisation is available on BBC iPlayer here.

Elsewhere in The Knowledge Premium:

🤝 One of Netflix’s biggest hits of 2023
🤦‍♀️ Liz Truss’s Pooterish memoir
🌊 The Hamptons of Scandinavia