Jeremy Clarkson ended the fifth series of Clarkson’s Farm in a hospital bed, told he was “nil by mouth.” Then he looked at the camera. “If this is all successful, I’ll see you in season six, and if it isn’t, I won’t. Take care, everyone.”
The finale went out on Prime Video on June 17 and carried his announcement that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer. He tells land agent Charlie Ireland and farm hand Kaleb Cooper in the penultimate episode. “I’ve got cancer,” he says. “I’ve known since May. I had a biopsy done and it is cancer. It’s aggressive but it’s really early.”
He was diagnosed in May 2025, according to The Independent, which means the news stayed out of the public eye for more than a year. The scenes were shot last year. That is unusual for Clarkson. His storylines tend to leak early through his weekly column in The Times, social media and interviews, and he wrote about being “days away” from a heart attack in an October 2024 column, long before the farm series covered it.
Treatment and the harvest
Clarkson, 66, had hoped to put treatment off. “I was praying we could get the harvest done and then I could go and get some treatment, but it’s going to be slap bang in the middle,” he says, according to Farmers Weekly.
He had an operation in August. Later he tells Cooper what it involved: “The prostate, 10 per cent of it’s dead. The 10 per cent where the cancer is.”
Cooper, visibly shocked, tells him to look after himself. Ireland says he wishes him “a very, very speedy recovery.” Clarkson promises he will be fine.
The finale also turns on a pregnant cow that Diddly Squat had to destroy over a suspected case of bovine tuberculosis. A post mortem showed it never had the disease. “They’ve killed my pregnant cow for no reason,” Clarkson says.
The warning, and what came after
On Tuesday, June 16, Clarkson posted a video to Instagram. “Ordinarily we try to keep the show bucolic and charming and cheerful but the final two episodes, which drop in the middle of the night tonight, are none of those things really,” he said. “They’re a difficult watch. They’re really, really difficult.”
He has not yet given an update on his health. The hospital scenes were filmed at the end of last year, and he has been seen since. He filmed ITV’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, shown in an Instagram post in November, and introduced his dog Margaery to the farm’s breeding bull. Last month he cheered on the Hawkstone Farmers Choir, which he assembled from 34 British farmers to raise awareness of mental health in farming, when it won Britain’s Got Talent.
The series is the most streamed on-demand title this week, ahead of both ITV’s and the BBC’s World Cup coverage. A sixth series is expected in 2027.
Sources
- How Jeremy Clarkson kept his cancer diagnosis secret until Clarkson’s Farm finale
- Clarkson reveals cancer diagnosis in series finale – Farmers Weekly
- How Jeremy Clarkson kept his cancer diagnosis secret until Clarkson’s Farm finale
