Jeremy Clarkson had wanted the harvest finished first. “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 in the closing episodes of Clarkson’s Farm series five, released on Amazon Prime on June 17.
The treatment he means is for what he calls an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer. Clarkson, 66, tells farm manager Kaleb Cooper and land agent Charlie Ireland that a medical exam turned up a problem and a biopsy confirmed it. He says he has “known since May”, and describes the cancer as aggressive but caught at a very early stage.
“Where it is, is of no concern to anybody,” he says. In the final episode, though, he tells Cooper he has had a procedure on his prostate. “The prostate, 10% of it’s dead. The 10% where the cancer is.”
Cooper, visibly shocked, tells him: “Look after yourself.” Ireland says he wishes him “a very, very speedy recovery.” Clarkson’s answer is short. “Thank you. I promise you I will be fine.”
Back in a hospital bed
Later in the finale he is shown in a hospital bed awaiting surgery, and says there have been complications in his treatment. “We started season five with me in a hospital bed and here we are at the end of season five and I’m back in a hospital bed,” he says. Before filming ended he had been treated for blocked arteries, after a health scare in 2024.
He leaves the future open. “If this is all successful, I’ll see you for season six, and if it isn’t, I won’t.”
Several hours before the episodes went out, Clarkson warned fans on Instagram that they would be a “really, really difficult watch”.
The show follows his running of Diddly Squat Farm in Oxfordshire. Since it launched in 2021 it has been credited with bringing farming issues, and the pressures on British agriculture, to a wider audience. A sixth series is expected in 2027.
