Presenter argues that people can get the gardening advice they need online, making it hard for TV shows to compete
Monty Don will step down from Gardeners’ World after more than 20 years as its lead presenter
Gardeners’ World will not survive without Monty Don, Jeremy Clarkson has predicted.
Clarkson said viewers could get all the gardening advice they needed on social media – just as they could with cooking – suggesting that the BBC programme would struggle without its charismatic lead presenter.
Earlier this month, Don announced that he would step down from Gardeners’ World after more than 20 years at the helm.
Speaking at a Royal Television Society convention, Clarkson said television needed to produce fewer, bigger shows to compete with social media, also hinting that Clarkson’s Farm may be nearing the end of its shelf life.
“We’re currently thinking, what do we do after Clarkson’s Farm? And it’s going to have to be something bigger to stand out. It has to be unbelievably ambitious,” he said.
“Look at gardening shows. How are they going to survive, especially without Monty Don? Because anyone can do a gardening thing on social media. Or cookery – same thing. It’s very difficult to make a television show work unless you’re cooking on the Moon or doing something incredible.”
Filming on series six of Clarkson’s Farm finished this week, and the presenter’s comments about other potential projects will fuel speculation that the next series may be the last.
Clarkson’s Farm has been a hit for Amazon Prime Video, and Clarkson said it stood apart from his previous programmes, Top Gear and The Grand Tour, because everything viewers saw was spontaneous.
“The Grand Tour and Top Gear were big set pieces. There was a lot of unscripted between, but there were big set pieces, and I started to notice this visceral hatred with audiences [being expressed] on social media. They absolutely hated anything that they suspected was scripted or faked,” he explained.
“It’s unfair to say that The Grand Tour and Top Gear were scripted and faked, but the big set pieces were planned. So when I did Clarkson’s Farm, we decided to go straight down the line of there being absolutely no script at all. You get up in the morning and you have absolutely no idea what you’re going to do that day.
“It’s a totally different programme. You just see me going, ‘Why is this sheep dead?’”
The fifth series of Clarkson’s Farm ended with the presenter revealing his “aggressive” prostate cancer diagnosis to Kaleb Cooper, his farm manager, and Charlie Ireland, his land agent.
He admitted that the last few episodes of that series were a “difficult watch”, and signed off the final episode in a hospital bed, saying: “What I wanted to say was: if this is all successful, I’ll see you for season six. And if it isn’t, I won’t. Take care, everyone.”
Clarkson has since said that he is in remission, and was praised for “shining a light” on prostate cancer and encouraging more men to assess their health and get checked.
Discussing the changing nature of entertainment and the rise of content creators, Clarkson, 66, said: “Older people will remember Mike Yarwood. We were amazed at this man’s ability to mimic the Prime Minister. ‘What a gift this man has.’ Then subsequently we got Rory Bremner.
“And now you have social media. There are thousands of mimics on it, and they’re all absolutely fantastic. Same with comedians. We got The Two Ronnies, and there was nobody funnier in the world than these guys because they were the only comedians we ever saw. Maybe Jasper Carrott.
“Now, of course, I go online and there’s 10,000 very funny people out there. So it’s the democratisation of entertainment and I think that is a very good thing. But, my God, it’s exhausting.”
Clarkson also proposed that the BBC merge with ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky to compete with US streamers. He suggested a new organisation could be called Britflix, “where we could all come together and actually make properly good, bigger, fewer, better programmes”.
He added: “We’d just have to siphon off news. There’d be a licence fee for the news.”
