TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has revealed he has been meeting with Lord David Cameron, the former prime minister, and other public figures to discuss their shared experiences with prostate cancer.
The 66-year-old disclosed his diagnosis of “aggressive” prostate cancer, discovered early, in the latest episodes of the fifth season of his popular series, Clarkson’s Farm. In a subsequent interview with The Times, Clarkson confirmed that a PSA test two months ago showed no indication of cancer, and he is now officially in remission.
Clarkson explained that the idea for the informal support group stemmed from Lord Cameron’s own experience. “I was talking to David (Cameron) about it earlier this morning. He said the amount of people that come up to him is mostly in public conveniences and say, if you hadn’t owned up to it, I wouldn’t have got checked, and they wouldn’t have found it,” Clarkson recounted.
He added: “So now there’s a group of us, (food writer) Giles Coren, David, me, one or two other people, and we meet for lunch every so often. Everybody has different Gleason scores, and everybody has different Stockholm and PSA scores. We all compare notes and I actually get muddled with what mine were. But it is quite funny watching people looking at us and going, ‘that’s quite an interesting group of people, what do they all share in common?’”
Clarkson admitted that the news of his diagnosis “landed harder than I thought it would,” prompting him to issue a stark warning to the public. “This is why I have to say to everybody who’s reading this, please, please, please go and get checked,” he urged. “It’s not uncomfortable, it’s not undignified, and it’s a no-brainer. I did, and that’s why I’m sitting here talking to you 11 months down the line.”
Reflecting on the gravity of the disease, he continued: “I’ve seen so many people die of cancer. It doesn’t bear thinking about what it must be like to live knowing that an illness is going to kill you. It must be very, very, very distressing. I don’t know the history of what happened to (former Olympic cyclist) Chris Hoy, but to be told your cancer is inoperable and to still carry on you’d have to be incredibly brave.”
Speaking from a hospital bed in the season finale, Clarkson revealed he had experienced complications during treatment. He later told The Times these were caused by him resuming a course of tablets he had been taking for earlier vascular and cardiac problems without medical advice.
“That was horrific and it was all my own fault,” he confessed. “I’d been on drugs for heart issues and I had to come off them during the cancer treatment. Two or three weeks after the cancer operation, I thought I’d better put myself back on those blood thinners. Big mistake, huge. It (resulted in) a very big emergency in the middle of the night. I’m not even going to go into the treatment that was required as a result of that, because it was horrible. I didn’t ask a doctor, I just thought, ‘I’m sure it will be all right to go back on blood thinners’.”
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The cancer diagnosis came almost two years after Clarkson underwent a heart procedure, which saw him fitted with two stents to improve blood flow. Following that operation, his doctor had advised him to stop working and replace it with golf, as he shared in a column for The Sun at the time. He had also previously quit smoking after contracting pneumonia during a holiday in Spain.
Clarkson’s Farm chronicles the long-time television presenter and his team as they navigate the challenges of running Diddly Squat Farm near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. Since taking on the farm in 2019 and launching the popular reality series, Clarkson has become a vocal advocate for farmers, even attending a protest in London against the Government’s proposed inheritance tax on farmland in November 2024. The sixth series of the show is scheduled to air in 2027.
