Opinion: Forget the hype – the ‘Clarkson effect’ is a myth

I’m a farmer. I also co-own a pub and I write the odd column in the mainstream media so, sooner or later, someone was going to joke to me: “Are you copying Jeremy Clarkson?”

And, yes, the inevitable finally happened, a couple of days ago, at a New Year’s Eve party. 

I should, of course, have laughed it off in the lighthearted spirit in which it was intended and moved on.

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About the author

Stephen Carr

Farmers Weekly Opinion writer

Stephen Carr runs an 800ha beef, sheep and arable farm on the South Downs near Eastbourne in Sussex in partnership with his wife and four of his daughters. He also runs a nearby pub with his nephew, The Sussex Ox, which serves the farm’s beef, lamb, (and fruit and vegetables from the farmhouse kitchen-garden in season) through its restaurant.

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Instead, I found myself bristling, and explained through gritted teeth that I bought my farm 30 years before Clarkson bought his, bought my pub a decade earlier, and have been a journalist for at least the same amount of time.

So, nope, I wasn’t copying Clarkson. 

A little unnerved by my clipped response, my new acquaintance followed it up with a jovial: “Well, what do you think about his farming programme, then?” 

And yes, I should have brushed this off with a: “It’s very funny, he’s a brilliant communicator, and he’s done more for farming’s image than the NFU, TFA and CLA combined.”

But, to my mind, it isn’t, he’s not and he hasn’t and, two mulled wines down, I didn’t feel like saying otherwise.

Instead, I took a deep breath and said: “What do you do for a living?” He replied: “I’m a dentist.”

“Ahhh,” I said.

Then, after he’d laughed wearily, went on: “So how would you feel about Clarkson making a TV series about buying a dentist’s surgery, initially as an inheritance tax dodge, then – rather than continuing to rent the surgery to a qualified dentist – setting himself up as a dentist without any formal training or the slightest experience of oral medicine?”

My new friend was now looking a little alarmed but it was too late: I was off on a rant. Something else I’d “copied” from Clarkson, no doubt.

“Would you find it hilarious if Clarkson bought a dentist chair so big it couldn’t be fitted into the surgery, just like when he bought a tractor so wide it wouldn’t go through the gates on his farm?”

“Possibly?”

“And you’d laugh if, when he examined his patient’s teeth, they fled his surgery in alarm when it became apparent he didn’t know his molars from his incisors?

“Just like when the ‘sheeps’ he bought for his farm kept escaping from his fields because his drystone walls were too poorly maintained to keep them in?”

“Maybe?”

“What if Clarkson then claimed that the reason he couldn’t earn any money as a dentist was that the whole world, and especially this Labour government, was against dentists, and that this was the reason he’d failed to earn any money, rather that it being anything to do with his ignorance of all things teeth?

“Wouldn’t you, as a dentist, having trained for years to become skilled at a vocational profession that you love and respect, feel insulted to see it presented as something any self-declared, hopeless amateur could breeze in and expect to succeed at?”

My pal was by now realising he’d unintentionally touched a raw nerve.

It was two minutes to midnight. “Come,” he said. “Let me get you a drink to toast the new year.”

Then he clapped my arm and winked. “After all, I did notice our host is serving Clarkson’s beer.” And I did manage a laugh at that.