Jeremy Clarkson’s popular Amazon Prime Video series, Clarkson’s Farm, is back for a third season and once again his Diddly Squat Farm shop is at the heart of another dispute with authorities.
In the most recent episodes, Jeremy Clarkson receives a major setback from West Oxfordshire District Council when he is served an enforcement notice on his restaurant.
Consequently, advisor Charlie Ireland is compelled to audit the farm shop and prevent Jeremy’s Irish girlfriend Lisa Hogan from violating rules by stocking products made more than 16 miles away. I was fortunate enough to visit before the latest uproar and splashed out on some of Jeremy’s excellent local produce. It was pricey, but it was worth it. Try WalesOnline Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features
I went with a budget in mind – I am from Yorkshire, after all – but within a few minutes inside Jeremy Clarkson’s bustling farm shop, that budget was completely blown. A word of caution: it is not cheap, reports the Express. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever paid more for snack food than I did for the small selection of items I bought at Diddly Squat Farm.
It all began promisingly enough. After setting my sat-nav for Chipping Norton, I eventually navigated to the farm shop’s overspill car park, where, by midday, there was a buzz of cars flowing in and out. The road outside the shop, now a familiar sight to fans of the Amazon Prime Video series, was jam-packed with vehicles parked on every available grassy patch, lining both sides of the street.
The parking area – a muddy field – was complimentary, with no restrictions on duration or need for number plate registration, allowing visitors to park at their leisure and spend as much time as desired within the farm shop. And ample time you will indeed require. I learned that during the Welsh half term, families flock across the border for day trips, resulting in “four hour queues” just to enter the farm shop.
Together with my wife, we endured an hour and 15 minutes in line, which, true to British tradition, wound its way around the field outside the shop quite organically. My initial letdown came with the Cow Juice. The milk, affectionately dubbed by Clarkson himself, had run dry at the self-service Cow Juice vending machine precisely as we made it to the front of the queue, which was rather unfortunate.
Once inside the farm shop, patrons are given a brief moment to shuffle through the compact space and peruse the shelves. Despite its diminutive size, scarcely more than about 10ft by 8ft, the shop offers an extensive selection. The range spans from coffee to Jeremy’s Beef Jerky, cheese, pasties, Hawkstone lager, flour, pasta, rapeseed vegetable oil, fudge, crisps… and the inventory goes on.
There was also ice cream, lollies, cider and quite a few other snacky items and there seemed to be more fridges and freezers than on TV. I had heard there was meat like sausages and bacon, or bread, for sale at the shop but by the time I got inside it was all gone and I was left with mostly pre-packaged foods still in plentiful supply.
I opted for two bags of Diddly Squat Farm Hand-cooked Crisps, one ready salted and one cheese and onion. £1.70 a bag, for single servings the size of Walkers crisps. Bee Juice (aka honey) was on my hitlist. £12 a jar. I grabbed ‘Bee Juice Bites’ – chocolate coated honeycomb – and a bag of Diddly Squat Fudge. These were £4.80 apiece for quite small bags.
Rounding out my shopping list, I grabbed a can of Diddly Squat Shandy (because it’s gluten free so it won’t kill me), a bottle of apple juice and a candle that smells like ‘Jeremy’s B****ks’, which I spotted from a series one episode so, I had to go for it. The shandy was £3.25 for 330ml and the apple juice £2.40 for 250ml (or almost £10 a litre), so, as you can see, none of this is cheap.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much the candle cost as it was behind the till – like a naughty top shelf purchase and when I asked for a receipt I was told, ‘sorry we’re paperless’. Other items I didn’t pick up but were for sale included a jar of pesto for £7.99, chutney for £5.80 and smoked sea salt for £4.50 a jar. Coffee was £6.95 for a paper bag of the stuff, while granola was a similar price.
While it may seem a bit steep – especially when I found Cotswold honey for sale in a nearby village for £6.50 – these prices were anticipated. This isn’t Aldi, and this isn’t a place you’d go to do your weekly food shop. It’s a tourist attraction, at least in the off-season between filming.
It’s a TV set, a place like the Coronation Street cobbles, where you can walk straight onto the location of a hit streaming series and buy souvenirs. But unlike other TV gift shops – and gift shops in general – you can eat your souvenirs here. The keepsakes from Clarkson’s Farm aren’t keyrings and fridge magnets, tatty posters or photo prints. The items you take away to remember your trip to a television show’s set are all edible.
I saw those potatoes being planted, I saw the honey being collected, I saw the wheat being harvested – and then I left the gift shop with it. That’s ultimately what you’re paying for: home-grown souvenirs you followed from farm to packet on-screen, with a big Diddly Squat logo on top to keep after.
And it was all lovely to scoff down. The crisps were light and flavourful, not too greasy, not too punchy. The fudge is more like Scottish tablet – very crumbly – and the mouthwatering Bee Juice Bites made a Crunchie seem like hard, cheapy trash by comparison.
Jeremy responded to criticism of his farm shop’s pricing in his column for The Sun where he highlighted how supermarket pricing affected the farming industry. “An idiotic story appeared this week which said that food in my farm shop costs a lot more than it does in the nearby branch of Aldi.”
“Yes. It does. Because I charge customers what it costs to grow and prepare the food, rather than selling it for what the supermarkets are prepared to pay. Which would mean operating at a loss. The problem of supplying supermarkets is now so severe that many farmers are saving their money and not growing anything at all.”
