“I’ve got cancer.” Jeremy Clarkson said it flatly, to farm manager Kaleb Cooper and land agent Charlie Ireland, in the closing episodes of the fifth series of Clarkson’s Farm. Both men looked shocked. The episodes went out on Prime Video on June 17.
Clarkson, 66, told them a medical in May had led to a biopsy. “I disappeared off the other week and I had a biopsy, and it is cancer, and it’s aggressive, but it’s really early,” he said. The Guardian reported that the scenes were filmed last year and that he was diagnosed last summer.
He had hoped to put treatment off until the harvest was in. That did not work out. If he had not been checked and the problem not found early, he said, “this could well have been my last harvest.” As it was, he added, “there’s every hope that I’ll be harvesting this farm for many, many years to come.”
Asked what kind of cancer it was, he first answered, “Where it is, is of no concern to anybody.” Later, after a procedure, he named it. “The prostate, 10% of it’s dead,” he said. “The 10% where the cancer is.”
A hospital bed again
The series closes with Clarkson in a hospital bed. The fifth series opened the same way, after a heart procedure in October 2024 in which he was fitted with a stent. “Some of the treatment has gone awry, let’s say,” he said. “I’ll probably be here for a little while.” Elsewhere he told his co-star Gerald that he’d had the operation and “just fingers crossed it’s worked, we don’t know yet.”
His sign-off was blunt: “If this is all successful, I’ll see you for season six. And if it isn’t, I won’t. Take care, everyone.”
The night before the release, Clarkson posted a video to Instagram warning that the last two episodes would be “a difficult watch”. The show, he said, is ordinarily “bucolic and charming and cheerful”. He sounded emotional as he added that the episodes were “really, really difficult.”
Reaction and the numbers
Former prime minister Rishi Sunak wrote on X that early diagnosis “can make all the difference”. Piers Morgan called Clarkson his “old sparring partner” and told men to have a PSA test: “it may save your life.”
Prostate Cancer UK thanked Clarkson for sharing the news. Chiara De Biase, its fundraising and health strategy director, said he found the disease early, “but sadly this is still not the experience of many men across the UK.” Over 10,000 men a year are diagnosed too late for a cure, she said.
Cancer Research UK puts prostate cancer at 28% of all new cancer cases in men in the UK. The NHS runs no national screening programme for it. Men aged 50 or over can ask their GP for a PSA blood test, as can men from 45 who have a strong family history or are Black or African-Caribbean.
Sources
- Jeremy Clarkson announces cancer diagnosis in farm documentary series
- Jeremy Clarkson shares ‘aggressive’ prostate cancer diagnosis
