Jeremy Clarkson says he is bowed, but not beaten, by the local government bureaucracy he encounters as a farmer, but is inspired to fight by Kevin Costner’s character in Yellowstone.
The former Grand Tour presenter, whose hit Amazon Video show Clarkson’s Farm will return for a third series on May 3, told The Times newspaper he’s been watching the Paramount+ drama Yellowstone and is taking his cue to challenge officialdom from Costner’s character of rancher John Dutton:
“I’ve been watching Yellowstone. When someone displeases them, they murder them, take them across the state line and throw them in a ravine. I’ve been looking at that scene a lot.”
Clarkson’s turn to farming has seen a freshly successful chapter in his long TV career. The first series was commissioned for a single season in 2019 but went on to become the UK’s most watched Amazon original show. The Times reports that the second season premiere won 4.3million viewers.
Season two saw the presenter in dispute with his local West Oxfordshire district council, which refused his application to build a car park for his farm shop. Recently, however, in a change dubbed “Clarkson’s Law”, the UK government have loosened rules so that farmers can change existing buildings without council permission.
Clarkson told the newspaper: “If you apply for a grant you have to fill in 2,000 forms and wait for 2,000 years for a man to come in a rented Vauxhall and tell you that you must stop what you’re doing because he has found a bat or some moss.”
