The appeal of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon is that it tells it as it is - Sarah Todd

It wasn’t just the criminals; she called out her superiors at the station, her grandchild’s teacher, her work colleagues and left no stone unturned in telling her sister what she thought of her.

Sometimes she reflected on what she’d said; like the young policewoman she’d told to toughen up just hours before she was so gruesomely run over. But there was a rawness about her rants that was in such stark contrast to modern society’s buttoned-up efforts to censor everything.

It’s sad to imagine a young person inspired to join the police as a result of watching this series and then finding the sad reality that there is an awful lot of ticking boxes and respecting the rights of druggies.

Perhaps it’s living with yours truly, but The Husband has taken to watching old reruns of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. He chortles away as Reggie goes through his mid-life crisis; kicking back against the pointlessness of his job at Sunshine Deserts.

He speaks his mind so freely that after the adverts - invariably for stair lifts and funeral plans - a warning about it being a ‘classic comedy which reflects the broadcast standards, language and attitudes of its time’ is flashed across the screen.

The penny finally dropped; this must be for the benefit of the so-called snowflake generation. It’s a phrase that had previously gone over this correspondent’s head. The dictionary definition describes it as a slang term for a person, implying they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly-emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.

What a shame Jeremy Clarkson wasted his time expressing his opinions about the former American actress Meghan Markle. With King Charles otherwise occupied, agriculture needs all the ambassadors it can get and the industry is now split as to whether the television broadcaster-turned-farmer is still the man for the job.

While the jury is still out in some quarters - the Farmers Weekly debated it just last week - many in the industry are breathing a sigh of relief that season two of his Clarkson’s Farm is still being aired on Amazon from Friday.

The streaming giant had come under tremendous pressure to immediately sever all ties with Clarkson, but there were contractual agreements in place. Like him or loathe him, the former Top Gear presenter has done more through this programme to educate the public about the work and worry that goes into producing the nation’s food than a whole herd of fleece-gileted experts could ever dream of achieving. The very well respected shepherd and author James Rebanks has been quoted as saying Clarkson has ‘done more for farmers in one series of Clarkson’s Farm than Countryfile achieved in 30 years’.

As an aside, inflation in agriculture stands at nearly 19 per cent, from a peak in July last year of 26.3 per cent. As we all grumble at the increased cost of putting petrol in cars and heating our homes, this latest series will hammer home the eye-watering increases in farming costs, such as fuelling farm machinery and feeding livestock.

Now to finish back where we started, with plain speaking. It is perhaps the telling-it-how-it-is nature of Clarkson’s Farm that has done more to shine a light on the struggles within rural life than anything else.

In the first series we see the presenter trying his hand at various farming enterprises, having set himself the goal of transforming his Oxfordshire farm into a profitable business. Over time he realises that farming is about much more than balancing the books. We see him shed a tear when a sheep dies and the pure joy he feels when he harvests his first field of corn.

Viewers are left in no doubt that for all the fancy cars he’s driven and celebrity parties he’s attended, this is the happiest Clarkson has ever been. Surrounded by straight talking country people who don’t massage his ego or tell him what he wants to hear. Wonder if Prince Harry and his wife have thought about having a go at farming?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​