Clarkson’s Farm doesn’t have the same spirit of its early days – but Jeremy’s antics are still hard to resist

Jeremy Clarkson – controversial motor journalist and proprietor of Prime Video’s Clarkson’s Farm – has just sent his recalcitrant labradors, Sansa and Arya, on a month-long residential obedience course. But as he attempts to convince Sansa to sit or heel, she simply capers away, immune to her owner’s commands. “F***ing hell,” he laments with a sigh, “they’re worse than ever.” As Clarkson’s Farm returns for its fourth season, viewers are treated, once again, to the timeless comedy of irrepressible, unreconstructed buffoonery, as beloved of the master as it is of the hound.

The big change at Diddly Squat Farm is the elevation of its manager, Kaleb Cooper, to superstardom. As the season commences, Kaleb is off touring his one-man show (the opening episode is interspersed with clips from his act), leaving Clarkson to plough a lonely furrow. “Things have gone a bit topsy turvy,” Clarkson adjudges, from the seat of his Lamborghini (tractor). But twas ever thus at the farm, where simple questions are often met with complex solutions. The big new complication, this time around, is Clarkson’s aspiration to buy a pub, which will serve as both a secondary farm shop and a showcase of British food and drink.

The pub plotline proves a welcome distraction from the travails on the farm. In its fourth season ­– a winter of contentment – things have settled into a rhythm. Crops all but select themselves, the livestock are unruly but well established. The show confects the occasional set piece – planting willow trees to supply cricket bats at a two-decade profit horizon, or testing out new tractors like the good ol’ days of Top Gear – but the farm feels like a known quantity now. And so, the pub is a narrative necessity, reigniting the dreamy, entrepreneurial spirit that made Clarkson’s Farm’s early episodes sing. With Britain’s pubs in a crisis even more dramatic than the farming sector – with a third of all pubs having closed since the millennium – it might be up to Clarkson’s Boozer to inspire a new generation of publicans.

Because Clarkson – love him or hate him – is an inspirational figure in this department. Armed with nothing more than his reputation (oh, and Amazon’s blank chequebook), he throws himself manfully into every assignment on offer. With Kaleb gallivanting (catching “c*** flu”, the famous person’s illness, as Clarkson labels it), Clarkson hires a temporary replacement in the form of Harriet Cowan, a #farmtok influencer. It is a move typical of the show’s bait and switch. Clarkson is a vehicle for boorish, windbag humour, but he is not an evangelist for it. When he complains about being sore, his acerbic Irish partner, Lisa, replies unsympathetically. “That happens every time we have a period,” she tells him. “And we cope with it.” He is, by his own admission, a “hapless f***wit”, but one who oscillates between vilifying the council’s “planning police” and advocating better provision for mental health.

In short, the show is much more tolerable to the liberal mindset than many would expect. Clarkson has proven himself an important champion for rural affairs, at a time when the industry is challenged. He might be unpopular in the corridors of DEFRA, but many farmers see him as an improbable figurehead of a sector embattled on all fronts, by Brexit and climate change and immigration and the economy. All the same, these are points that he has been making since the first series aired, and, with this fourth instalment, the show does feel like it is running out of rallying cries. Kaleb is not just a star now, but a millionaire – Strictly surely beckons – and the Diddly Squat Farm Shop a popular tourist pitstop. The show’s central question – can a know nothing TV celeb build a successful farm business? – feels like a fait accompli.

But the fact remains that Clarkson’s Farm is, perhaps, the best executed example of the constructed reality genre – narratively nimble and crafted with the same artisanal affection that goes into a jar of Bee Juice honey. Like crop yields after a wet winter, it might be suffering from diminishing returns, but there’s still some gentle British wit to be harvested, too.