Jeremy Clarkson: Ozempic, pickleball and becoming a grandfather
He nearly died last year and has since been on a diet of Ozempic, pickleball and alcohol abstinence to improve his health. Where’s the joy in that?
Jeremy Clarkson rolls up the leg of his suit trousers to show me his pickleball injuries. It’s not pretty: a blackened area of skin on his knee, deep lacerations on his shin and, on his right hand, what’s left of a fingernail. “We had a number of people over at the weekend for a tournament,” he explains. His girlfriend, Lisa Hogan, was his doubles partner. “After we started at 10am Lisa had taken some sleeping pills by accident – she thought they were hay fever tablets – and I was left to cover 94 per cent of the court. I’m not the fastest man in the world, which is why I fell over.”
Why is Clarkson, the man who once declared that running was something you did only if you were rushing for a bus or being chased by a bear, sprinting around playing a fast-paced mixture of tennis, badminton and ping-pong?
He explains that the doctors who carried out an emergency heart operation on him when he fell ill in October told him to exercise and lose weight. He’s trimmer than he was, thanks in part to the pickleball court he has painted on to the farmyard and his “mono diet”, of which we’ll hear more shortly.
He’s smartly dressed because he’s having lunch at White’s club in London’s genteel St James’s, to which he’ll be whisked by Range Rover straight after the interview. He won’t say who he’s meeting – “friends” is all he’ll divulge, with a wink – but notable White’s members include the King and the Prince of Wales. Prince William features in the next-but-one series of Clarkson’s Farm. It can’t be Clarkson’s neighbour and friend David Cameron, the former UK prime minister, because Cameron quit the club in 2008 in protest over its men-only policy.
Clarkson has made coffee and we’re sitting at the kitchen table among a stack of half-read newspapers. Arya, a fox red labrador, is nuzzling me for attention. “Sorry, is that dog annoying you?”
Clarkson turned 65 in April and he laments the effects of growing old. “You wake up every morning and a part of your body that worked perfectly well yesterday has become wonky in some way,” he observed in a recent Sunday Times column. “Then you have to watch the television with the subtitles turned on, and then you can’t read them because you can’t remember where you put your spectacles.” He’s due a health check-up, he tells me. “I’ve got my medical coming up next week, where you have the indignity of a man putting himself in you, in order to check your prostate,” he says. A consultant told him he might have been days from death before undergoing a life-changing op – an angioplasty to insert stents – last autumn.
The saga began last year on the North Island in the Seychelles, where he was on holiday with Lisa. (The private island is where William and Kate spent their honeymoon, and is billed as “the ultimate in barefoot luxury”.)
Midway through diving off a boat he realised his brain was writing cheques his body couldn’t cash. “I always try and dive off a boat on every holiday because at my age you never know when your last dive is going to be – or your last anything, for that matter,” he says. The dive turned into a huge belly flop.“When I finally reached the beach my lungs were full of water and I realised I can’t do it any more.” Back home in England he woke feeling “clammy, with a tightness in my chest”. Then his arm froze with pins and needles and he called an ambulance. A CAT scan in hospital revealed two arteries were occluded, probably from years of smoking 40 Marlboro a day (he quit in 2017). Doctors inserted stents to prop open the vessels and told him to give up high-fat and processed foods.
There’s irony in the fact he has surrendered to a lifestyle he has gently mocked over the years. For a while he complained he was allowed only lettuce and water and an occasional glass of wheatgrass. “I’ve eaten grasshoppers and tarantulas, and I once had a seven-day egg that had a bit of beak and an eye in it. All of those things were pretty awful. But nothing, nothing, gets close to the gut-retching dreadfulness of wheatgrass.”
He’s back to eating meat – mainly lamb and beef reared on his farm, served plain, without the rich sauces he was fond of. It’s a mono diet, he says. “The way my doctor described it, if it has one ingredient, like steak, or egg, it’s fine. But not supermarket lasagne.” Cutting his alcohol intake has also helped, though he hasn’t given up altogether. Abstinence gives him “slow-motion jet lag”, he says. “If you go to bed with a clear head, your mind is active, so it chews stuff over and works things out. This means you don’t fall asleep till two and you don’t wake up till nine, so you won’t fall asleep the following night till three.”
For a while he tried Ozempic but it didn’t agree with him, he says, a bit like cyclists. After transitioning to Mounjaro, another drug developed to treat type 2 diabetes but commonly used for weight-loss, the temptation to binge-eat abated. “I could open the fridge door, look at all the goodies, then close it.” Small portions were enough. “You can pop a teaspoon of snail caviar – made from unborn snails – on to half a Ritz cracker and you have yourself the 21st century’s answer to a medieval banquet,” as he wrote recently.
His work rate hasn’t slowed, he insists. He still has nine jobs (“Count them: nine”) – farmer, shopkeeper, brewer, landlord, fly-on-the-wall documentary-maker, quiz show host and writer of three newspaper columns. Turning 65 used to be a significant milestone in the days when, before 2018, it was the age the British state pension kicked in. “I can’t get my pension until I’m 67, and by the time I’m 67 they’ll almost certainly have moved it to 68. At this rate I’ll never get an old age pension.
“But I am told by a friend who’s a wealthy chap in London that he’s got a free Oyster card [for train travel] so he can go from his house in Holland Park to, for example, Gatwick or Heathrow for nothing. For once, you actually get something back from those thieving bastards in Whitehall. I’m so looking forward to it.”
He lived full-time in London for 15 years, at one point – pre-Top Gear days – sharing a flat in Fulham, southwest London, that was nicknamed the “Vomitorium” because of its grubbiness. “If you stood on the carpet for more than five minutes you stuck to it. I lived there for three years and throughout that time nobody did any cleaning, ever.”
Does he miss London? “No, I don’t. Not because I don’t like London, but it’s in a bit of a mess. If you live there I don’t think you notice. It’s like ageing – you don’t really notice you’re getting older day by day as you shave in the mirror every morning, but if you were to look in a mirror every three months, you’d notice your deterioration. You go to London and think, ‘Oh my God.’ Notting Hill used to be, ten years ago, a vibrant place full of amazing shops. Now they’re just boarded up. It’s depressing. Let’s be honest, Sadiq Khan is not making a very good fist of it. If you are in a certain sector of society he’s probably a good mayor, but if you’re not in that sector of society I think he’s probably a terrible man. If you’re running a chichi shop in Notting Hill, you’re in a sector of society that Sadiq Khan doesn’t really care about.
“It’s not just Notting Hill; it’s the West End as well. I don’t take my phone out when I’m walking down the street. The last place I can remember doing that was Kampala [in Uganda], when I was conscious that I shouldn’t pull my phone out. I think London’s a bit doomed but I still love it. It’s still got great restaurants and brilliant things to do. Plus, my grandchildren are in it.” He is a grandfather to two girls, Arlo, aged two, and Xanthe, six months. Their mother is Emily, 30, the eldest of his three children. “They were here for the pickleball tournament and they are absolutely adorable and the best things in the world.”
Last month saw the start of season four of Clarkson’s Farm, the Amazon Prime behemoth that has pulled in tens of millions of viewers. “I prefer to call it ‘series’,” he says (other Americanised English terms he dislikes include “reaching out”, as in making contact, and “passed” instead of died). Right now he’s already halfway through filming the fifth season, due in 2026. It takes some mental gymnastics for him to rewind to the contents of season four. The storylines woven through the eight episodes include his purchase of a pub – a rundown roadside establishment in the Cotswolds called the Windmill that he snapped up, spruced up and renamed the Farmer’s Dog.
The idea grew out of wanting to sell his farm produce directly to customers – a philosophy called “farm to fork” that he believes can help save the endangered British countryside. Naturally, starting a pub brought its own problems. “I wanted it open for the August bank holiday and it proved quite the challenge. But we got it done – if you count ‘open’ as having no water, gas or sewers. People will look at what happens [in the show] and say, ‘You must have made that up. You couldn’t have that many calamities.’ But we absolutely did. Every single thing you see in the show genuinely happened, and it boggles the mind.
“We discovered that the five acres of grounds were classified by the council as a public picnic site with public lavatories. Over the years the picnickers had become doggers,” he explains, referring to the strange practice of people having sex in public places, watched by strangers. “It was called – not my words, the words of some of the locals – the A40 bummers’ club. Various activities took place there at night and you would find G-strings and Durex and performance-enhancing drug wrappings everywhere. We went to the council and said would it be possible to have this picnic site designation removed, and they said sure. With that gone, there was no reason not to buy it, so we dived in.”
On the pub’s opening day, Clarkson banned Prime Minister Keir Starmer and James May. Will he relax the restriction – at least on his former Top Gear colleague? “That’s just a joke. James May, he’s not banned.”
Will he stock May’s own gin? “Only if it’s locally produced, including the juniper berries. All the food and drink we sell is homegrown. We don’t have ketchup, we don’t have coffee, we don’t even have lemonade. There’s a million things we don’t have. When I first had the idea to build the restaurant, it was to help local farmers. We would buy their produce at the proper market price. I have exactly the same philosophy at the pub: it’s there to back British farming, that is its sole function.”
Is he surprised by the success of Clarkson’s Farm? “I certainly was after the first series went out, yeah, and the second. I did think it’d serve up gentle disappointment to the Top Gear, Grand Tour audience. I very much was typecast as this man who drove around corners too quickly while shouting and using hyperbole to make a point. I thought, ‘Why would anybody who watches Top Gear or The Grand Tour want to watch this bucolic show about farming?’ Then they did, and it brought a whole new audience who’d never watched a single program I’d made. It’s massively popular in China. A huge number of Chinese people come to the farm shop and the pub. I said to one of them the other day, ‘Why do you like it?’ He said, ‘We watch it because we cannot believe how incompetent you are.’”
The incompetence – and Clarkson’s petrolhead tendencies – continue in the new season. To appease Kaleb, his farm manager, he agrees to retire his oversized, ageing Lamborghini tractor and replace it with something more modern. The replacement machine is, predictably, just as big – a monster made by Deutz-Fahr and styled by Clarkson’s favourite car designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, the man behind the original VW Golf and the DMC DeLorean. “My Lamborghini was becoming troublesome,” he says. “Tractors are just unbelievably unreliable – I think it’s because they’re all ultimately very small volume production, by Toyota standards at least. So I got the new one and then thought, ‘Sod it, I’ll put my own Lamborghini badges on it.’”
We stroll to an outbuilding to photograph Clarkson with a scale model of the tractor. Lisa breezes in wearing a baseball cap and gilet. She’s being filmed with newborn lambs, and disappears off to a barn with a camera crew in tow.
What he surely couldn’t have predicted when he moved his main residence here from London in 2018 was that he’d bring London’s affluence with him. Local house prices have shot up, fuelled by new money and the Covid exodus. Driveways are stocked with Range Rovers, and health spas are flourishing. The area around Chipping Norton looks like Chelsea in wellies. A short drive away is Soho Farmhouse, a private club that charges £3,000 ($6300) a year in membership fees. Meghan Markle had her hen do there. David and Victoria Beckham have homes a stone’s throw away, as do TV stars Simon Cowell and Claudia Winkleman. Clarkson reminds me he was here first and came to get away, not to arrive. Has he been to Soho Farmhouse? “I’ve been twice, that’s all.” But a stream of celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres have visited him at the farm and pub. When Beckham was photographed with Gerald, Clarkson’s head of security, Clarkson cheekily posted a photo of the pair captioned “Gerald with another man.”
Will the fifth series of Clarkson’s Farm be the last? “I’d do a sixth if there was a reason for doing it, like a bloody good story,” he says. “But if, say, my back turns out to be cancerous then I wouldn’t. Whatever happens, we’ll definitely take a short break as the crews are all worn out. We’ve been filming here two or three days a week, every week, for five years. Everybody could do with a rest.”
Will he ever retire? “I’d just be an alcoholic if I stopped working – what else would I do? I have no hobbies, I’m good at nothing. Some people enjoy playing golf or fishing or whatever. When they retire, they can indulge themselves in their hobby on a more full-time basis. I’ve never really had a hobby. I think hobbies are for people who were caught masturbating by their mothers when they were younger. ‘Stop doing that and get a hobby...’ I’m not really interested in anything particularly. What would I do? Watercolour paint? Birdwatch? I wouldn’t be able to fill the day. No, I enjoy having lots of different jobs to do.”
The other motive is to earn money. During his hiatus between Top Gear and The Grand Tour, when he did no TV work for a year, he couldn’t bring himself to spend money because there was hardly any coming in. “I find it very difficult to spend anyway,” he says. “I painted some lines in to make a pickleball court because I’m too mean to put a tennis court in. You don’t need nets and it’s a quarter of the size.”
If and when Clarkson’s Farm ends, he may return to making single-issue documentaries like those he’s fronted in the past on the great civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, wartime Arctic convoys and Britain’s World War II raid on German U-boats. “My mind is still attuned to stories, as is anybody’s with a vaguely journalistic background. You go, ‘That would make a good story, that would interest people.’ I’ve got probably ten ideas in my head. But then you’ve got to sell it to a broadcaster and they’re all in dire straits these days.”
Is he ever tempted to resume smoking? “No, never. It isn’t as though I’m even fighting it. Lisa still has the odd one and she’ll light up and you think, ‘Oh God, I’ll have one’, but I never do.”
His restless energy stems from a strong sense of his own mortality. Each day he reminds himself that, whatever he’s doing, it could be for the last time. “When you die, you’ve done everything in your life for the last time, be it clean your teeth or go for a walk with the dog or whatever it might be... I’ve definitely skied for the last time. I was in Zermatt on a beautiful day with magnificent snow and I suddenly thought, ‘I hate this, why do I do it?’ I’ve never been back and I never will. When we filmed in Zimbabwe for the final Grand Tour I thought that would be the last time I would power-slide a car. I thought, ‘That’s it.’”
He pauses, then says: “Except it wasn’t because I did a skid on purpose in that Ford Mustang I tested the other day. I found myself on an empty stretch of road, so I put it into a power-slide round a corner and shouted.”
Series four of Clarkson’s Farm is streaming on Amazon Prime
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