Jeremy Clarkson has expressed his grief when a number of piglets died on his Diddly Squat farm.
The former Top Gear host, 64, is returning for a third series of his Amazon Prime programme Clarkson’s Farm, following life on the farm in Oxfordshire with spouse Lisa Hogan and fan favourites Kaleb Cooper and Charlie Ireland.
Expect pandemonium, including Clarkson’s learning from Cooper and confrontations with demonstrators and cops, as well as emotional moments.
Speaking to the press, Clarkson shared: ‘You don’t say, “Let’s buy some pigs and hope they die,” I’ve always liked pigs.’
‘My mother used to buy me toy pigs every Christmas and birthdays,’ he went on, recalling his ‘fondness’ for pigs.
‘I thought it would be fun to have them, and then they just died in alarming numbers.
‘It was very heart-breaking, I’d never ever seen Lisa, not once ever, until that all started.
‘It was just terrible. I mean they still die, but we’re getting more used to it now, we’re a bit more robust.’
He added: ‘We’re a bit stronger at dealing with it now. But it was a very heart-breaking time.’
Clarkson continued by saying that he’s also ‘very fond’ of his goats and cows on the farm, despite Cooper telling him to ‘kill’ the goats to ‘sell’ and ‘eat’.
‘But I actually thought, no I want to keep them because I like them, but the pigs you have to sell them, otherwise nobody would keep pigs if you didn’t eat them.
‘There would be no cows or pigs in the country if people didn’t eat them.’
He added: ‘So in order to have the animals you have to eat them at the correct time, and it is weird, because you love them and you give birth to them and you nurture them and you feed them, you take care of them, you get the vet round when they’re poorly.
‘And then you kill them and it is a strange place to be when you haven’t been a farmer all your life but we are getting better at it, we definitely are.’
Speaking about the heart-breaking pigs scene, Lisa added: ‘Jeremy’s always
loved pigs, I didn’t think I’d be that enamoured by pigs but I did get really close
to them as people will see.
‘Farming’s just sad. The animals become your friends and you’re isolated – there are certain farms that are really isolated – and the animals become your family.
‘When they become unwell, you’re losing members of your animal family.’
Introducing the new season, Clarkson elsewhere joked: ‘It’s me against the man again in season three, but the man this time isn’t West Oxfordshire District Council, it’s Kaleb.’
He went on: ‘Everything that happens is genuine reality television… and none of it is planned.
‘I mean, The Grand Tour everything was planned, truly everything, like Richard [Hammond] move your eyebrow that much.
‘Nothing is planned on this, no script, and every single day when we meet to do filming, I have a vague idea of what we need to do… and I can guarantee we’ll end up doing something completely different because the weather will have changed or some fence will have fallen down or whatever it might be.’
Clarkson’s Farm series 3 launches globally on Prime Video on May 3 2024.
