The Times Magazine 23have to be culled. (“I did feel affection for
those sheeps,” he later says.) He is jubilant
when he births a lamb. (“I did a thing!”) He
is delighted to grow a potato. (“I did another
thing!”) He is also wondrously humbled by
those who know the land intimately.
The secondary characters are terrific. There
is Cheerful Charlie, the land agent who is a
stickler for government rules and delivers bad
news like a kindly doctor. (“It’s effectively not
effective at all,” he says of Jeremy’s pumpkin
enterprise. He has, apparently, yet to watch
the show. “Just not interested in himself,” says
Jeremy.) There is Kaleb, the now 23-year-old
tractor driver and Chipping Norton boy who
had only been to London once on a school
trip and refused to get off the coach because
he didn’t like the look of it. He is incredibly
knowledgeable while sporting a series of
increasingly bad haircuts.
And then there is Gerald, my Gerald, the
72-year-old dry-stone waller and the farm’s
“head of security”, who has worked it for
50 years and has such a strong West Country
accent he is melodious but indecipherable.
Jeremy is baffled. We’re baffled. The subtitlers
are baffled (“Indistinct muttering” is all you
get). The scene where Jeremy and Gerald
combine-harvest together has to be the best
TV moment of the year, surely. But there is
something so pure of heart about him that he
instantly became my favourite human ever.
Can you understand him, Lisa? “I can, yes.”
Really? “I can get the gist of it. He is lovely,
always so chirpy. And always laughing, which
is so charming.”
Jeremy says, “I love him. It was Gerald who
gave me the idea to do the show. I first met
him in a field back in 2008 and thought at the
time he’s such a great character for TV.”
I snatch moments with Clarkson through
the day, ambushing him with questions like:
when did you realise you had a monster hit
on your hands? When The Guardian gave it
a one-star review, he says. But then he adds,
“The trouble is, you don’t get viewing figures
but you can tell. When I’m stopped in the
street, which is all the time, nobody but
nobody is talking about the car shows. All
anyone talks about is Kaleb and Gerald and
farming. It’s as if I never did a car show. It’s
erased history. I’m thrilled to bits, pleased as
punch. It might even win a Bafta.”
Haven’t you already won a farming award?
For showing farming as it really is, rather than
some idealised Countryfile version? “Two,” he
corrects. And the shop, that seems to be doing
well? “People come from miles and miles. It’s
unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. I am so
proud of Lisa. How she has gone from – how
can I put this politely – a sedentary and rather
luxurious life [she was once married to a
multimillionaire baron] to find herself living
on a farm where she didn’t know anyone...The ordering and keeping the place stocked- I don’t know how she does it. It’s a great
little business.” You made a grand in a day
when you were only selling rotting potatoes,
I say, so it must be a gold mine. “It makes a
fair bit,” is all Lisa will say later.
I settle with Lisa in her office. She says
when Jeremy first came up with the idea and
asked her to take charge of the shop, their
lives were still mostly in London, “So it was
a way of getting me down here.” Hang on,
stop, wait. The whole Amazon business was a
ruse to make you up sticks? “Exactly. I think
Jeremy wanted me to move down here full-
time, but if he’d said that to me I might have
just said no.” But you agreed? “I said I would
do it, but I want to be able to do what I want
to do in it.”
And he’s left you alone? Or do you have to
keep saying, Jeremy, keep your nose out of it?
“I wouldn’t say that to Jeremy, ever. I use
reverse psychology. If he has an idea I say to
him that’s an amazing idea, you are absolutely
right, and then he’ll come up to the shop and
I’ll go, ‘I tried your idea but I also think this is
good, so I’m going to see what works.’ That’s
much easier. Certain people like to argue and
they like to win. I don’t care about arguing or
winning. I just want to do what I want to do.”
It’s all new to her and, yes, she does wake
up at 3am thinking: jam, jam, must get hold
of more jam. “What I do at the moment is
work all day, cook dinner, watch a movie
with Jeremy – probably an old war movie or
something; he watches a lot of old war movies - and then he’ll go to bed and I’ll have my
quiet time. I can’t go to bed if I know I have
2,000 emails. He’ll come in at two in the
morning and say, ‘What are you doing?’ ”
Does he ever cook dinner? “He has one
signature dish, pork with pasta, and he’ll do
that very occasionally.”
He won’t work the dishwasher but how is
he with laundry? They are currently holed
up in a one-bedroom cottage while their new
house (in the Georgian-Palladian style, from
the look of it) is still being built, and when she
specified a laundry room he was perplexed.
“He said, ‘You’ll never go in the laundry room.’
At the moment I dry everything on the Aga in
the cottage. It’s like a Chinese laundry. I had to
say, ‘Where do you think it all comes from?’ ”
And have you ever presented him with a
platter of cold meats when he was expecting
a steak and – how might I put this politely?- experienced his extreme displeasure? “Ha.
No. He once did say he didn’t like something
I made, so we went to the pub for five nights
straight. He had to realise if he wanted me to
cook for him and wanted food in the evening
at home, it would be clever to compliment
everything I did.” Nicely played.
Lisa was born and brought up in Dublin.
Her father, Maurice, an architect, died
suddenly when she was 14. He had dropped
her at school that morning and was later
reading though some notes in his car for a
meeting when his heart gave out. “Arrhythmia.
It went out of beat and never caught up.” She
still misses him, “but do feel he is sitting on
my shoulder”. Her mother, Arlene, a former
model, “sat in her chair in a vegetative state
for about a year, then thought she’d better
get a grip and went to university”. She did a
doctorate “and now translates medieval Latin”.
Lisa’s first ambition was to travel, which she
did, funding herself through modelling, and
for a while she worked for John Cleese as his
researcher, and even appeared in the 1997
film Fierce Creatures. “I played a seal trainer
alongside Ronnie Corbett. It was great fun.”
She had married at 25. Her husband was
Baron Steven Bentinck, nephew of the late
steel tycoon Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-
Bornemisza. They divided their time between
London, New York, a mansion in Klosters,
Norris Castle on the Isle of Wight and Moyns
Park, an Elizabethan country house in Essex.
Also, there was a £5 million yacht. Do you
miss that life now? “Not at all.” How about
when Jeremy is Wasp-Ezeing his crack? You
don’t think, I wish I were back on that yacht?
She insists not. “I don’t really think about it.
It was just a time of my life.”
They had three children, now young adults,
but the marriage ended in divorce. She was
single and rather enjoying being alone when
she first met Jeremy. “We were introduced at
a party. I was about to leave and he said, ‘No,
you’re staying to have a drink.’ ” Did he woo
you with, “Stick with me and one day you’ll
have a barn full of rotting potatoes”? Or,
“Stick with me and I’ll show you my bottom
unpixelated”? He did not. “It was quite a long
courtship as I didn’t know where he was in his
life. And I wasn’t ready to start dating again;
When Jeremy first asked
her to run the shop,
‘It was a way to get me
down here full-time’
Clarkson in the pub with Gerald, left, and Kaleb, in JuneJEREMYCLARKSON1/INSTAGRAM