Jeremy Clarkson forced to overhaul diet after being 'days from death'
Ella Scott
Featured Image Credit: Prime Video
Jeremy Clarkson’s recent health scare apparently forced him to rethink his diet after doctors revealed he was quite literally ‘days from death’.
The former Top Gear and The Grand Tour favourite is set to return to Amazon Prime Video next month with the fifth outing of his ‘real’ reality TV series, Clarkson’s Farm.
Four episodes of the beloved programme, which documents the 66-year-old’s farming escapades with girlfriend Lisa Hogan, 51, farmhand Kaleb Cooper, 27, and other members of the Chipping Norton gang, will drop on 3 June.
Two more instalments will debut on the streaming service on 10 June, before the penultimate and final episodes of Clarkson’s Farm series five drop seven days later.
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Alongside dealing with geese, new tech, and ‘big changes’ at Diddly Squat Farm, the show will provide an intimate look into Clarkson’s recent health woes, which began in October 2024.
In the official season five teaser trailer, which aired on 18 May, terrifying footage of the broadcaster hooked up to an electrocardiogram (ECG) in an Oxford hospital was shown.
“You’ve got three arteries that feed your heart to keep it pumping. My heart wasn’t getting any blood,” Clarkson could be heard telling Cooper, 27.
The event saw Clarkson being told he was ‘days away from death’ and that he needed to have heart surgery as two of his vital arteries were occluded.
The father-of-three had two stents inserted into his chest to keep the blood vessels open.
He was told that he would no longer be able to eat high-fat, processed foods, which led him to try GLP-1 jabs, including Ozempic and Mounjaro.
According to the NHS, too much saturated fat can raise cholesterol levels, increasing the risk of heart disease.
Processed foods, which often have little to no nutrient value, have previously been linked to an increased risk of health conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Opening up about his current health on an episode of Heart Breakfast (broadcast on 21 May), Clarkson said he is now ‘fine’.
The answer came after host Jamie Theakston, 55, said that the TV favourite looked ‘very well’, adding: "I know you’ve had a couple of health scares recently."
"Yes, it’s fat jabs," Clarkson quipped. "I look like a Lowry painting."
He added to Theakston and co-host Amanda Holden, 55: "Yes, it was quite a fraught year last year but no I’m absolutely fine now. Tickety-boo!"
According to Clarkson, series five of Clarkson’s Farm will be ‘the most dramatic yet’, insisting: "It gets more and more dramatic towards the end. I'll say no more than that because we're not actually doing any PR for this series at all.
“I thought farming when I first started, what, seven years ago, you just drive around in a Range Rover, went to the pub occasionally and moaned about the weather and then in February went skiing.
"I thought 'well that’s easy I could do that'. And then I started doing it and it is unbelievably difficult. And I’m lucky because I’ve often got a film crew here so there’s a lot of people.
"But when there isn’t a film crew here you start to realise 'God I’m all on my own all day.' Literally all day six in the morning until midnight.
"And then you think 'oh God there’s no money coming in,' because there isn’t."
He added that he now understands that other farmers have money worries alongside concerns about loneliness.
"These guys are on their own worrying all day long that the weather is not right and that another subsidy is gone and they’re being forced to grow bird food rather than human food.”
Ahead of Clarkson’s Farm series five, products from The Diddly Squat Farm Shop have officially launched on Ocado.
Products including Shortbread Diddly Dunkers, oak-smoked rapeseed oil, and Little Turds, AKA chocolate-covered honeycomb balls, are now available to purchase, with more set to be listed in the future.
Every Diddly Squat Farm product purchased via the Ocado website wil see 5p donated to the Ernest Cook Trust, an educational charity that encourages young people to learn from the land and get involved with outdoor causes.
Speaking about the Ocado collab, Hogan said: “Diddly Squat has always been about celebrating British farming in a hands-on, practical way, from what we grow to how we share it with people.
The Irish model added that the collaboration allows the business to ‘stay true to its roots’.
Lucy Silver, partnerships lead at Ocado Retail, said: “Diddly Squat is an exciting brand to have on site and allows us to deliver a farm shop experience to our customers’ doors.
“We’re always looking for ways to support British products and expand the choice of local produce for our customers.”