Lisa Hogan is strolling around the Diddly Squat barnyard in a gilet and wellies on a beautiful spring day in the Cotswolds. She is introducing the extended cast of Clarkson’s Farm, the reality TV series she produces with her long-term partner, Jeremy Clarkson.
Among the animals introduced are the labradors, Sansa and Arya, the prize bull, End Game, and the lambs scattered across the sunny hillside. Hogan, 55, with her mellow Dublin accent, explains that the lambs are EasyCare sheep, naturally self-shearing, as she points out tufts of wool on the grass.
The scene is picturesque and almost surreal, reflective of the celebrity appeal the Cotswolds hold, with notable residents like David and Samantha Cameron, the Bamford dynasty, and the Beckham family, who have chosen this region for their grand countryside homes. Hogan mentions how she collects their apples annually to make cider and recounts a recent encounter with Blur bassist Alex James at their local health club’s sauna.
Lisa Hogan in a dress by Reiss, with a rather chic(k) accessory…
As for the other local big beast – Hogan’s partner of nine years, Clarkson, 65 – he’s in London today. But his presence lingers, from the Lamborghini tractor in the yard to the hand-painted sign: ‘Anyone found dropping litter will be shot in the face’. Over at the farm shop, meanwhile, the graffiti in the loos attests to his enduring popularity: ‘Jezza 4 Prime Minister’, ‘Clarkson the ledge’, and, inevitably, ‘Starmer is a c**t.’
Clarkson’s status as a folk hero to petrolheads was more or less assured from his many years presenting Top Gear and The Grand Tour with his old muckers, James May and Richard Hammond. Since going solo in 2021 with Clarkson’s Farm – a reality show about his attempt to make a going concern of Diddly Squat, the 1,000-acre Oxfordshire farm he bought in 2008 – he has drawn his colleagues from closer to home. Clarkson’s no-nonsense farm manager, Kaleb Cooper, already has a significant following. But the real breakout star of the three series so far has turned out to be his glamorous, no-nonsense girlfriend Hogan, a former model and actress with a sly wit, flair for branding and surprisingly extensive knowledge of livestock.
‘I always loved animals,’ she says, reminiscing about her 1970s Dublin childhood. ‘I think I milked my first cow when I was five. That feeling of the milk squeezing through the teat – I veered towards anything like that.’
Three things strike me immediately upon meeting Hogan. One: she is tall. ‘Five foot 13 and a half,’ she insists. Clarkson is the first man she has dated who’s taller. ‘When I was young, at school discos, I’d be sitting down with my friends and someone would come over and ask me to dance. They’d literally be hanging on to my clavicles.’
Jumper, Max Mara. Jeans, Palmer Harding. Earrings, Misho. Lamb, model’s own
The second thing is that Hogan is a hustler. Within five minutes, she has handed me a faintly embarrassing amount of Diddly Squat-branded merchandise: chopping boards, mugs, honey tequila, tea towels, baseball caps, plus a scented candle labelled ‘This smells like my bollocks’, which, one suspects, is the only kind of scented candle that Clarkson would ever countenance putting his name to. ‘This is the stuff I do day to day,’ she says. ‘All of these boxes. I’ve been doing this for five, six years now, and I love it. We do genuinely grow everything, too, and I even pick a lot of it.’
The third thing I notice is that she’s extremely funny. She pours us a shot of Diddly Squat honey tequila and we clink plastic cups. Does tequila really count as ‘local produce’, I wonder? ‘No, but because I put my honey in it, and that’s from all around the farm, that makes it local enough to sell in the shop. Cheers! Nice to meet you.’
This is precisely the effervescence she brings to the screen, though Hogan puts the success of the show down to Clarkson’s natural storytelling instincts. ‘He’s been in the business long enough to visualise it all,’ she says. ‘He’s a couple of chess moves ahead.’
The overarching theme of Clarkson’s Farm is just how hopelessly difficult modern farming is. Clarkson proves utterly hapless behind the wheel of his ‘Lambo’. The schemes he hits on for improving his fortunes – opening a farm shop, breeding pigs, experimenting with crops – invariably fail due to the vagaries of the English climate, local bureaucracy or Clarkson’s own celebrity (the queues of traffic to get to the farmshop initially prompted a furious response from neighbours). He is regularly bailed out by his land agent, Charlie Ireland, or – in the recently dropped fourth season – Harriet Cowan, a 24-year-old TikTok star who comes to work on the farm while Cooper is away on tour and proves formidably knowledgeable.
All of this makes for entertaining TV but the show is also genuinely insightful about the realities of farming, from the loneliness many farmers experience to the heartbreak of losing animals. Hogan herself broke down on camera midway through last season when a sow accidentally crushed her litter of piglets to death when they were just a few days old. ‘If an old animal dies, it’s sad, but you’re prepared,’ she says. ‘If it’s a piglet, you expect it to survive. That’s what took me aback.’
Lisa poses with a labrador in a jumper by Max Mara
Talking of ailing old animals, Clarkson himself recently survived a significant health scare. What began as a feeling of clamminess while on holiday in the Seychelles last year turned out to be blocked arteries, requiring emergency surgery to fit two stents in his heart to improve blood flow. We will have to wait until the fifth season to see that play out on camera but in the meantime, Hogan has him on a regime of pickleball and kale and says he’s doing much better. ‘I’m so relieved,’ she says. ‘He had been getting unwell for a while. His arteries needed to be cleared and now they are.’
She shows me the greenhouses where she grows the kale. ‘I sneak it into his soup. If there’s enough chilli on it, he’ll eat anything.’ The central drama of the fourth season – the first half of which went up on Amazon Prime a week ago – is instead centred on Clarkson’s latest scheme to make the farm a success. He announces he wants to open a pub that will only serve food and drink from the farm and its neighbours: so, his Hawkstone brand lager and cider, gammon steaks, sausages of the day, spring chicken casserole, Wye Valley asparagus… Naturally, it’s a total disaster. ‘I can’t watch the last two episodes,’ Hogan says. ‘It’s such a f**king horror show. I just find it excruciating.’
Still, such is the lag between filming and reality that we know the pub really exists and hasn’t collapsed into a pile of rubble. It’s a former coaching inn on the A40 called the The Farmer’s Dog and Ellen DeGeneres has been spotted having dinner there. ‘Jeremy has been so passionate about making every single ingredient English,’ says Hogan. ‘Even our pepper comes from Cornwall.’ That means no coffee, no Tabasco in your bloody Mary and no lime in your rum and coke – because rum and coke are also verboten.
With partner Jeremy Clarkson at this year’s Cheltenham Festival
I wonder aloud if any English pub in the last 500 years would have been remotely like this? ‘Have you heard of Jeremy Clarkson?’ she laughs. ‘Obviously he likes to try new things. But I think that if England was cut off from the rest of the world, he’d like to feel safe.’ Would he actually be quite pleased if that happened? ‘Yes and no,’ she says. ‘I mean, obviously not. But [the pub is] an interesting test case.’
Running the farm sounds truly relentless but Hogan insists it has become more manageable, and the queues of cars in the village have mostly receded. ‘When I was opening the shop, that was the hardest year,’ she says, referring to the disputes with both neighbours and council. ‘That felt personal. I don’t like antagonistic behaviour. But hard work? That’s just par for the course.’
A love of the outdoors runs deep. Hogan keeps returning to the subject of soil erosion – a passion of hers, clearly. Raised in Dublin, which she insists was mostly fields back then, Hogan describes her childhood as pretty idyllic. She sailed near Dun Laoghaire and built horse jumps from fallen trees with her friends. But it had its challenges. Her father, an architect, died when she was 14, meaning her mother, an academic, raised her alone. ‘It was a shock. We were the only single-parent family we knew in Dublin. Divorce wasn’t legal in Ireland then. But it made me independent.’
At 19, she took off to Australia, hoping to connect with a godmother who had gifted her some jewellery she treasured. She never found the godmother, but she did spend a year in Australia and Hong Kong and eventually settled in London. There she modelled and acted, earning a credit as a sea lion keeper in the John Cleese zoo caper Fierce Creatures (1997).
She married Baron Steven Bentinck (a relative of the late steel tycoon Baron Heini Thyssen) in 1998 and had three children with him – Elizabeth, now 26, Wolfe, 25, and Alice, 23 – before divorcing in 2011. She was introduced to Clarkson by mutual friends at a drinks party nine years ago. Of course, she knew who he was. ‘I used to let my son stay up to watch Top Gear, but I never really watched it myself. I knew him more from his writing. I always loved his columns. I thought he was bright – and probably amusing. And I think he thought I’d be amusing.’
Lisa with a couple of piglets in season four of Clarkson’s Farm
Is he different when the cameras are off? ‘He’s always incredibly inquisitive,’ Hogan says. ‘His mind is always on the move. He’ll come in fizzing with energy about the smallest thing. I like that.’
Clarkson’s lack of a marriage proposal is a source of running humour on the show, but if Hogan is truly bothered by this she is not letting on. The pair are together ‘24/7,’ she says, and their children get on well. Clarkson has three of his own from his former marriage to Frances Cain: Emily, 30, Finlo, 28, and Katya, 26. ‘Emily has this podcast called Shall I Delete That? and she spoke about my daughter in such a sweet way that I burst out crying. They’ve known each other for nine years and I think they really care about each other.’
In all, Hogan says, it’s been ‘really easy. Why wouldn’t it be? I’m the lunatic in this asylum, so no one else has any issues’. She illustrates the point by describing a recent family lunch involving the two sets of children. Hogan was excited to find tadpoles had arrived in the pond and so she decided that, instead of a bouquet of flowers, she would place a vase filled with tadpoles at the centre of her table. ‘Jeremy said: “What are you doing?” I said: “It’s like a tablescape. It’s interesting!” Jeremy thought it was horrendous, but I could also see that he was charmed by me creating a centrepiece of live tadpoles. I could see the romance in his eyes.’
She insists it was an excellent idea. ‘It was fascinating! You could have a conversation and see them wandering around. Well, anyway, I put them back because everyone was pretty freaked out by it – but I could tell, he was charmed.’ She maintains that live tadpoles would make an excellent centrepiece for a dinner party. ‘Or imagine live jellyfish! I could watch them go up and down all night.’
You can see why Hogan is a natural on screen. It helps that she is happy to submit to the relentless filming schedules: up to four days a week, week in, week out, one season starting the day after another finishes. The production crew now operates from an outbuilding in the absolutely enormous Clarkson country pile, near the high-spec gym and pickleball court.
Jacket, De Savary London. Vest, Max Mara. Jeans, Agolde
And being filmed has its advantages. She has learnt that if she has something to say that Clarkson won’t like, it’s better to do it in front of the cameras. ‘I’ve worked out that when he’s wearing a mic, he can’t interrupt me. So that’s when I go for it.’
Mostly, however, she avoids arguing with him. ‘I’m more conniving than that. Why argue with someone like Jeremy? He’s so eloquent. I have to be a bit more… nimble. I like the long-term diplomatic approach.’
And Clarkson, she adds, has mellowed. He’s a grandfather (Emily has Arlo, two, and Xanthe, five months) and he ‘adores’ them. He is also much happier now he no longer has to spend as much time travelling as he used to for The Grand Tour. These days his commute is just a few minutes across the yard. ‘We work hard, but there’s no traffic jam. You just walk out the door – and your calf has escaped.”
For all their incredibly famous neighbours, Hogan insists they are happiest on the farm.
‘There are some really great people. They’re all bright and high octane and I really like everyone, but we don’t go out that much. We work a lot. And we have a lot of evenings watching box sets, eating food that Jeremy’s grown and I’ve burned!’
It sounds like quite the idyll.
Clarkson’s Farm season four is now available on Prime Video, with the final two episodes dropping 6 June
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Fashion director: Sophie Dearden-Howell.
Fashion assistant: Hope Palmer.
Hair and make-up: Julie Read at Carol Hayes.
Ellis O’Brien/Prime Video, PA/Andrew Matthews
