Clarkson’s Farm leader lifts the lid on the show’s biggest challenge — and the bold strategy he believes will secure its future

Clarkson’s Farm boss Andy Wilman revealed the genius way he plans to overcome the show’s biggest threat – and why it trumps other past hits as his favourite.

Although Jeremy Clarkson has had years of improvement as a farmer, he said it will be a long time before he runs out of tasks to prove hopeless at.

Speaking in an interview for the High Performance podcast, Andy, 63, reassured fans they will continue to be gripped by the show’s portrayal of life on Diddly Squat farm.

The producer promised that while Clarkson no longer shows himself to be a totally incompetent farmer – the basis of the first four series – work on his farm will continue to throw up jobs that ‘he’s still crap at’.

Andy said already-filmed scenes featuring young farm manager Kaleb – who previously professed his reluctance to ever leave Britain – were TV ‘perfection’ as he and Clarkson travel to Belgium to see a high tech farm.

Asked by Jake Humphrey if the farming show will lose its magic as Jeremy learns, and is no longer such a ‘bad farmer’ surrounded by experts, Andy said there was no need for viewers to worry.

He promised the show will be authentic and not fake incompetence if Jeremy does manage to do anything adequately, but added there will always be new farm activities that proves beyond the Top Gear front man turned farm owner.

Andy said: ‘We’ve got to keep going as long as we can. This series we’ve just shot now that we’re putting together, (series) five, we’re very careful.

‘There are certain things he’s still crap at, like he can’t hitch a trailer up, so that’s genuine.

‘But if he could hitch a trailer up we wouldn’t go ‘could you pretend not to’. We’d just leave it.’

He added: ‘When he’s actually down in the grain cart harvesting, he’s not dropping everything as much any more, he can reverse it in, he’s not clanging into everything. We just leave those ones be now.

‘Then he’ll find another thing that he’s crap at, that he’s got to learn, or not understand.

‘And this series, in a press release it will look terrible, because he wants to go high tech.

‘But it does give us amazing telly, because him and Kaleb go and visit a farm in Brussels with really high tech stuff. It means Kaleb’s got to go abroad for the first time.

‘And that drive down to the Channel Tunnel and through the Channel Tunnel with Kaleb is just gold dust. It’s just perfection.’

Andy also said storyline scenarios on the show will not be devised for television by producers, but instead they will be genuine farming issues worked into good TV viewing by Clarkson’s astute television brain.

Meanwhile, Andy and Jeremy’s talent for television built a huge audience for Amazon Prime series The Grand Tour, after they previously turned Top Gear into the world’s most popular factual programme.

Discussing his longtime friend, Andy said: ‘A lot of them will be him. Given his research abilities, he’s going through Farmers Weekly, he’s looking at stuff on sale. And then with his brain – that’s a bit of a Top Gear brain.’

Despite Andy’s past global success with Top Gear and then The Grand Tour, he said Clarkson’s Farm was now dearest to him.

He said: ‘I’ve got more affection for the farm. I know Top Gear was an incredible thing, but I’ve got more affection for the farm because it was a runt, and then it’s like quietly made itself amazing.’

When Jeremy first came up with the idea of a farming show for Amazon, executives desperately tried to get Andy to persuade him to drop it.

But Andy said Jeremy told him he did not blame the streaming giant bosses because the two of them were also terrified it could end up boring.

Continuing, the TV producer said it turned out to be compelling TV because the real-life farm experts used at the Diddly Squat farm bought by Clarkson turned out to be ‘lightning in a bottle’ for television, despite none of them being auditioned for the show.

They include young local farm worker Kaleb, who did not own a passport and had never been on a train, smart professional farm management adviser Charlie Ireland, Clarkson’s girlfriend Lisa Hogan, head of security Gerald Cooper, and builder Alan Townsend.

Andy said: ‘What we didn’t see coming was Gerald, Lisa, Charlie, Kaleb, Alan the builder. Nobody was auditioned.

‘And that was lightning in a bottle. Because that cast was not a cast, it was the people there.’