Jeremy Clarkson has delivered the most emotional episode of Clarkson’s Farm yet, with the TV presenter being forced to give away his pigs after they failed to make him money.
So far in the Prime Video hit’s fifth series, we’ve seen Clarkson open up about being days away from death after suffering a heart emergency before burning an effigy of Keir Starmer in response to the farming tax controversy – and the drama continued at his Cotswolds Farm after being told that keeping his beloved pigs was no longer financially viable.
The latest episode, out on Wednesday (3 June), saw Clarkson’s butcher reveal that Diddly Squat’s particular breed of pig could only produce sausages due to how much fat there is around the meat. With his collection of pigs therefore losing money for the farm, Clarkson decided to go the whole hog and get rid of them all.
“I love the pigs. I’ve just been delighted with every day I’m down there, they make my heart sing I’m so happy with them but we’re running a business here and they make no financial sense at all,” he said in the episode.
With most of the swine being sent to the slaughterhouse, Clarkson broke down in tears as he said goodbye to them all – including one of the mother pigs from the first batch he’d bought three years before.
“It’s still f***ing sad,” a tearful Clarkson told farmhand Kaleb Cooper.
Thankfully for Clarkson’s two original mother pigs, Clumsy and Swizz, they were heading off to live the rest of their lives on a child-friendly farm and not to the butcher.
“The one bit of good news in this whole sad saga is that these two had at least been saved from the slaughterhouse,” he told his girlfriend, Lisa Hogan. “They’re going off to a farm that’s like a school so children go, ‘These are pigs.’
“I couldn’t really have handled it if they’d gone off to be eaten. They’ve had four batches of piglets.”
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As the pigs were driven off, Clarkson began crying, with Lisa consoling him over the loss of his hogs.
The episode ended with a heart-breaking montage of the pigs’ time at Diddly Squat, set to Yusuf’s track “Father & Son”.
Clarkson’s pigs have starred in a number of stand-out moments from the Prime Video series, from a piglet being sick into the TV presenter’s coat pocket or Clarkson naming a “violent” boar after Harvey Weinstein.
It’s not the first bit of devastating news to hit Diddly Squat; the Cotswolds-based farm was struck by an outbreak of bovine tuberculosis last year.
Bovine TB (bTB) is a chronic respiratory disease caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium bovis. The disease can be catastrophic for farmers, and forces the culling of infected cattle.
Clarkson’s reaction to the outbreak will be shown in this series of Clarkson’s Farm, with the presenter previously revealing that everyone on the farm was “absolutely devastated” by it.
“I got up this morning and found one of my puppies has died,” he told Times Radio at the time. “And we’ve got a very sickly calf. Honestly, farming? I’m not enjoying it this week.”
Clarkson’s Farm will release new episodes every Wednesday.
