Chaos follows Jeremy Clarkson. His new pub The Farmer’s Dog – set to open this week – has faced massive pushback from locals, worried about surging numbers of tourists in the area. He’s pushing ahead regardless.
So maybe it’s no surprise to learn that filming the most recent season of his hit show Clarkson’s Farm almost put his girlfriend, Lisa Hogan, in jail. “My neighbour said she would bring me cigarettes — I don’t smoke but I would start — and rosé in prison if I took one for the team,” she says from behind the Diddly Squat farm shop counter, where I meet her on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. “I was like, ‘Actually I wouldn’t mind a bit of time out. It’s quite busy’.”
Dressed in a knitted white jumper adorned with sheep, her long blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, the 51-year-old is confident, chatty and easygoing — a good match for Clarkson’s brand of provocative contrarianism. And yet, despite Clarkson’s ability to pick fights seemingly out of thin air, she was the one in trouble. Why? Turns out, it’s all to do with that same farm shop, which Hogan runs and which functions as the nexus of the drama in the latest season of the show in which she stars alongside Clarkson.
Hogan was told off by a member of the local council and warned that she faced a criminal record if she didn’t remove all items in the shop that hadn’t been produced within a 16-mile radius. They also threatened to close the shop. She eventually complied, but is still irritated. “I was going to take one for the team. Because you pay so much in business rates and taxes and you give it to the council, and they use it to fight to close you down,” she says. “It seemed strange, their behaviour. I understand that there are certain rules, and they’ve done me a favour actually because I wouldn’t have found half of my suppliers unless I really had to search for them within 16 miles, so I’m really grateful to them for that. But I just think they overreacted a bit.”
Out of danger (for now, at least) Hogan holds court behind the counter. She’s effortlessly charming, but perhaps that’s no surprise: born in Dublin, she started out as a model before veering into acting (she was once referred to as John Cleese’s muse) and, though details about how she met Clarkson are scant, it appears to have been at a party in 2017.After a life of jet setting (including being married to multi-millionaire Baron Steven Bentinck), she’s now a country girl.
And as we walk around the shelves and taste her homemade Diddly Squat crisps, she regales us with stories of excited tourists who make pilgrimages to the farm (one family from New Zealand drove up from London for the day just to say hi). She is also a consummate saleswoman, plugging the shop’s extensive range of produce. It runs the gamut from a scented £22 candle called “This Smells Like my Bollocks” — in reality, it smells like car leather and, er, some other stuff — to Diddly Squat’s homemade pork chops and honey, here renamed Bee Juice.
But while all is tranquil in the farm shop, the same is not true for the barn outside. “Kaleb [Cooper) keeps saying, ‘Kill the goats! Go on, kill them. Then you can sell them, we can eat them,’” her partner, Jeremy Clarkson — writer, former Top Gear host, and now farmer — is complaining. “No, no, I want to keep them as lawnmowers.”
Cooper, Clarkson’s 25-year-old farming partner, sidekick and star of the show, isn’t having it. “He’s got 29 boy goats, yeah, so therefore they don’t produce milk,” he shoots back. “They’ve got lovely eyes,” Clarkson replies weakly. Are they hamming it up? Of course they are: three seasons in, the team are consummate showmen, and they know what the audience want. And that is more of the double-act frenemy relationship between Cooper (first a farm-hand, now promoted to farm manager) and his sort-of mentor, Clarkson, which forms the heart of the show. Cooper is now a celebrity in his own right with more than two million Instagram followers and a sold-out national stage tour.
It’s been an interesting journey. In 2008, Clarkson bought Diddly Squat farm, a thousand-acre plot of land in Chipping Norton, when the financial crisis forced his neighbour to sell it. Though there were no plans at the time to turn his life there into a show, some 16 years later, he has turned it into a globally successful reality TV series for Prime Video — season two drew in 4.2 million viewers and was Prime’s most-watched show last year.
Not one to sleep on an opportunity, Clarkson hastily opened the Diddly Squat farm shop, which has been joined in recent years by a burger van, Baste, and a short-lived restaurant — all of which attract a huge and constant stream of curious tourists. As you might expect, there have been consequences. The shop has been the target of local rows, caused by punters queuing for hours on the narrow country roads to get their slices of Diddly Squat bacon and causing huge tailbacks throughout the area.
In 2021, an angry neighbour launched a legal battle against the presenter, with the aim of stopping him turning a lambing shed into a restaurant and creating a “Jeremy Clarkson theme park”.
The restaurant was ultimately shut by the council, and is still closed today. But for Clarkson and co, it’s worth all the bother, because the shop is also ridiculously lucrative.
In the first week it opened, it made £1,000 a day selling only potatoes, and while no official figures have been released, Hogan has admitted it “makes a fair bit”.
Why has it become so popular? Clarkson has his own opinions. “It’s genuine reality television. What you see actually happens, and none of it’s planned,” he says. “I mean, the Grand Tour, everything was planned, literally everything… Nothing is planned on this. Nothing. I have no script.”
This year, pigs have also arrived at Diddly Squat, and we’re duly driven to meet them through the wildflower fields that Clarkson has planted to refertilise the ground (“Jeremy loves the soil,” his land manager, Charlie Ireland, tells us solemnly). Frolicking around in the afternoon sunshine, they sure are cute. Why pigs? “I’ve always liked pigs,” Clarkson says.
“My mother used to buy me toy pigs every Christmas and birthday, actually until I was in my 20s. I’ve got a huge collection of them. I’ve always been fond of pigs and I thought it would be fun to have them.”
Never mind the pig sty, Clarkson was in the doghouse in late 2022, when he wrote a deeply offensive column about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, saying he dreamed of a day “when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”. Even his daughter was unimpressed. He won’t talk about the incident, but has been trying to be less controversial ever since, with limited success.
There’s just enough time at the end of the day for a speedy burger at Baste and a pint of Clarkson’s local beer, Hawkstone, as the sun turns the surrounding fields golden. And as for the man himself? After a spin on the Lamborghini tractor, he’s packed into a Land Rover and speeds off, no doubt on the trail of more chaos.
