Tragedy has struck Diddly Squat Farm once again – and Jeremy Clarkson has revealed it’s all been captured on camera for Clarkson’s Farm season five.
Jeremy Clarkson has hinted at a heartbreaking storyline that will play out during series five of Clarkson’s Farm.
The team at Diddly Squat have faced adversity in recent years, with cast member Gerald Cooper battling prostate cancer, a devastating outbreak of TB, and plenty of farming mishaps and financial strain.
And now the broadcaster-turned-farmer, 65, has revealed the latest instalment will feature yet another tragic twist for the farm when it airs this May.
Speaking about the drama set to unfold during the fifth chapter of his rural life in Chadlington, West Oxfordshire, he explained that none of it was planned and he never knows how things will end.
The former Top Gear presenter told the My Week in Cars podcast: “There is no script to this TV show, people always go it’s staged but the pigs dying, Gerard’s cancer – you can’t stage any of it.
“We’ve got a donkey that’s desperately ill at the moment, we’ve all got our fingers crossed that it makes it but I don’t know, I can’t write a script saying ‘then it got better’ because you don’t know what the donkey’s going to do.
“So you have to be ready to go – but you do spend an awful lot of time sitting around doom scrolling on your phone waiting for the weather to get better or for animals to do something.”
In early March, Jeremy introduced a new donkey to Diddly Squat Farm called ‘New Ben’, sharing a sweet snap of the animal with fans on Instagram.
Ben is thought to have replaced a previous donkey, also called Ben, who regularly appeared on social media alongside his companion Bill.
It’s not clear whether Ben is the poorly donkey in question but fans will only have two months to wait until the fresh episodes begin rolling to discover what happens to the sick animal.
Meanwhile, Jeremy revealed that production on series six of the Prime Video show has been stop-start due to ever-changing British weather.
Talking about the difficulties of torrential rain and cold climates when working as a farmer, he explained in his Sunday Times column: “There’s no filming happening on the farm at the moment, or farming.
“It hasn’t stopped raining since the beginning of the year, so I can’t plant anything, and I can’t do anything with my cows either because we are still locked down by TB.”
Now spring is upon us, it seems the farming (and filming) can re-start, as Jeremy recently explained: “There’s either a little crew [here all the time] or a great big crew and I think it’s the great big crew back here tomorrow.”
