Clarkson's Farm (Amazon Prime)

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Jeremy Clarkson once claimed that global warming whingers made him want ‘to shoot a polar bear in the middle of its face’.

He says he watches David Attenborough documentaries as a drinking game, chugging a beer every time climate change is cited.

So the 64-year-old presenter and petrolhead is an unlikely champion for green farming. Yet, as Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon Prime) returns – his improbably popular telly diaries of muddles and mishaps on his 1,000-acre Oxfordshire rustic retreat – he is teaming up with a millionaire pop raver to promote ‘regenerative agriculture’.

Simply put, this means cutting back on chemicals and planting a mix of arable crops to coax the land back to health.

His conversion seems about as plausible as Chris Packham commentating on F1, but he is in earnest. What an irony if Clarkson becomes the chief ambassador for back-to-nature politics – though, on the other hand, no one could have predicted before Amazon Prime launched this show in 2021 that he would be the man to make farming look fun and even cool.

Clarkson’s mind has been changed, he admits, not by climate stats or conservationists but by the impact of extreme weather on his farm.

As the show opens, he’s moaning about ‘the driest summer for 87 years’. That’s 2022 – no doubt he’s equally unhappy about the 18 months that followed, officially the soggiest since records began.

Relentless drought meant his potatoes developed ‘skin set’, a condition where the tubers close up like clams. Unable to grow, they remained inedible pebbles. The sunflowers dried up, too, and the ground was too hard for planting oilseed rape for the next year’s crop.

A celebrity farmer requires a celebrity solution, so Clarkson turned to Andy Cato, once the keyboard player in 1990s electronic hit group Groove Armada. Cato sold the rights to his songs six years ago to buy a farm and now runs a company promoting a more natural, less intensive approach to food production.

‘Our soils have been pounded and poisoned to a point where they’re within a few decades of giving up,’ he tells Clarkson and his land agent, Charlie Ireland. ‘We’ve lost 80 per cent of our insects. We can’t keep doing that.’

‘Pay attention!’ screamed a warning label blazed across the screen, and ‘this is important!’ I half expected Clarkson to parrot Greta Thunberg’s famous lament, ‘You haf stolen my childhood!’

Cato’s methods aren’t organic, but rely on selective use of chemicals, rather than blitzing the crops with insecticide and artificial fertilisers. He plants wheat and beans mixed together, because the plants support each other.

And this is the bit that really caught Jezza’s attention: he sells his grain to Marks & Spencer. The mere mention of their brand brought a smitten smile to his face.

Cato made a less positive impression on the real star of the series, 25-year-old Kaleb Cooper, now the farm manager and still driving combine harvesters like they are go-karts.

With his rich Cotswolds accent and untamed facial hair, he’s a real-life Wurzel – and he resented a lecture on agronomics from a man he plainly regarded as an amateur.

‘Were you in a band?’ he growled at Cato. ‘I can tell. Because you left a tractor running at a pound-a-litre of fuel.’

With his crops failing, and the district council forcing him to close his lucrative restaurant, Clarkson was driven to seek alternative moneyspinners.

First he harvested the hedgerows for blackberries, boiled up with sugar for jars of jam (he calls it Jeremy’s Juice and there’s a picture of him on the front, but if you’re going to buy your preserves from an egomaniac, this is only to be expected).

Simmering in huge tureens, the jam did look delicious. I’d love to see a comparison test, with Jeremy sampling Meghan Markle’s American Riviera Orchard strawberry conserve, while the Duchess tastes his blackberry spread. Sussex vs Chipping Norton – what a titanic contest.

With his girlfriend Lisa Hogan, Clarkson then set about rearing pigs on the parched potato patch. The running joke of the show is his epic incompetence, and I can’t help wondering how often he deliberately engineers a cock-up on camera... knocking over a drystone wall, toppling a fencepost, hanging a pair of five-bar gates so that neither of them opens properly.

But he insists the scenes aren’t scripted, and relies on his gift for constant chunter. Every so often, muttering endlessly to himself, he coins a perfect phrase: as the running costs mount up, for example, he complains the profit-and-loss column ‘looks like Boris Becker’s bank balance’.

And as he manoeuvres a massive blackberry picker up a narrow lane, he worries about meeting a bus coming the other way: ‘He’ll be going home with a picking machine fastened to his face like a moustache.’

The one perfect quip, though, fell not to Jeremy but to Lisa. Droning on about rare breeds, he was explaining to her at length that his favoured breed of pig, the shandy and black, nearly went extinct.

‘Shandy and black, it sounds like the sort of thing a Northern woman would drink in a pub on a Friday night,’ he opined. ‘But a few years ago, there was in the whole world only one man pig.’

‘Boar,’ said Lisa.