Clarkson’s Farm has made no secret of the realities of farming in the UK, but now Jeremy Clarkson is claiming running a pub is ‘harder than anything’.
Since opening The Farmer’s Dog country pub, just down the road from Diddly Squat Farm, Jeremy Clarkson’s boozer has been plagued by problems. Even before the business was up and running, the former Top Gear presenter was handling issues involving everything from management to toilets, and the 65-year-old has now admitted being a landlord is in fact harder than being a farmer.
The Cotswolds resident made the admission after revealing the pub had been “swindled” out of £27,000 by hackers. The Asthall pub, formerly known as The Windmill, is located near Burford in Oxfordshire, and was reopened by Clarkson on August 23 2024.
His struggle with the pub, on what Clarkson himself described as a ‘former dogging site’, has featured in the latest series of the Amazon Prime series Clarkson’s Farm. Now he has opened up in his column for The Sunday Times newspaper, cataloguing some of the challenges they have been facing, including the loss of thousands of pounds to internet fraudsters.
Clarkson used the column to discuss the various problems his team at the pub have encountered over the last year including rowdy customers, toilet problems and taxes on publicans declaring running a pub is “harder than anything. Even farming,” adding: “We were hacked at the Farmer’s Dog last week and swindled out of £27,000.”
And it seems some of the clientele also leave a lot to be desired, as Clarkson continued: “A lady came to my pub recently and after enjoying several glasses of our wonderful Hedgerow cider, had a stumble and then tripped over her hair extensions, which caused her to vomit explosively into her own cleavage … She fished handfuls of the sick from her bra and then passed it to our manageress.”
He then added: “Or how about this one? A little girl in the garden became a bit upset because a little boy from the next table had nicked one of the pine cones she was using to build a castle. History doesn’t relate what happened next, but whatever it was, the two fathers decided that the only solution was to try to strangle each other.”
Clarkson told the tale of another child who accidentally locked herself in a toilet stall so other customers grabbed a crowbar and hacked the door from its hinges and another incident in which a woman claimed to have been given beer instead of cider and the gluten in the drink “made her so ill she had to cancel her holiday”.
He went on to say: “[She wanted us to] reimburse her. Happily, we have her on CCTV not drinking beer, so we are safe on that one. But often landlords aren’t so lucky. Many tell me this food intolerance fraud is now an epidemic.”
He also accused some customers of failing to use the bathrooms properly and leaving the walls “pebbledashed” with “a gallon of diarrhoea” and another man who allegedly films himself urinating on the floor of pubs and posts the videos on social media. Clarkson added of the man: “I’d actually like to catch this guy as I’d very much like to kill him.”
The TV star went on to list annoyances including the theft of cooking oil from the pub’s kitchen and issues with building inspectors demanding he install new fire escapes at the cost of around £1 million.
He concluded: “This is why one pub in the UK is closing every single day at the moment. It’s hard enough dealing with all of the vomit and the faeces and the fights, but when you factor in the local authority, and taxation, and the government’s exciting new laws on workers’ rights, it becomes nigh-on impossible to stay sane.”
