It began like one of those strange dreams. You’re naked, the Queen is coming to check the oil tank, and you’re going to miss a flight to Corfu. In reality I’m in a cage, there’s a wall of people in shorts and T-shirts taking photos with their phones, and a man called Kaleb driving a huge Lamborghini tractor is dragging us to a small shed in the middle of a field of barley.
I’m struck by a conflict between utter familiarity and total novelty. You see, I grew up in a beautiful, remote hamlet in the Evenlode valley, near Chipping Norton; a childhood of little streams, fields of wheat, a railway and a humpback bridge, a thatched cottage, a compost heap, a small pig farm and a brace of village idiots in thick dark suits, heavy shoes and braces.
Now, just over the hill from there, one man’s comical travails as a farmer have become a global hit on Amazon Prime. And because Clarkson’s Farm went down so well, a new season is being filmed, which means they need new content. So having done shite weather, big tractors not fitting in sheds, and a farm shop that sells only potatoes, the producers have scratched their heads and decided that Jeremy should do something really stupid: so he’s opening a restaurant.
Now, I thought season one was utterly wonderful, so I was excited about the Diddly Squat restaurant. Having tussled with the planning authorities, Clarkson discovered that under ‘permitted development’ he could open a restaurant in what had recently been a farm building sheltering animals.
So we arrived – you’ll know you’re there because of the bollards lining the road around the farm, and the hordes of tourists – and checked in with a youth in a small wooden shelter. He was with two other men holding walkie-talkies, and there were about five or six other people apparently working here – directing traffic, people and so on.
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