"Me and Jeremy just clicked"
Kaleb Cooper has helped turn Jeremy Clarkson into a farmer and his show into a hit. But does he really want him to be his best man?
When Jeremy Clarkson decided to make a series about running a farm, nobody expected it to become much of a hit. Yet five years later and with a third series due to launch, Clarkson’s Farm is now Amazon Prime Video’s most watched show.Perhaps even more surprisingly, its most
popular character isn’t Clarkson himself but his farm hand Kaleb Cooper, a 25-year-old who has barely travelled beyond his home town of Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.
As a result, Cooper now has more than two million followers on Instagram and is mobbed wherever he goes: fans have even flashed their bras at him and walked past Clarkson to get a selfie with the blond, ruddy-cheeked farmer, famed for his ever-changing hairstyles.
The now father-of-two realised he had become a star when his phone imploded after the show’s launch. “As a farmer, my phone is always the worst model because I never have the chance to go out and upgrade it. Amazon asked me to post something on my Instagram, where I only had about 600 followers. So I did, and my phone literally blew up – it got so hot with all the new followers and people messaging me that it actually broke. I had to message Amazon to say, ‘Can I get a new phone? You’ve broken mine.’ That’s when I realised.”
The casting of Cooper, who grew up with his parents Rachel (a dog groomer) and Mark (a carpenter), happened organically. Having started a contracting business at the age of 16, he was already working on the farm under its previous contractor and was asked to stay on for two months after Clarkson took over the running of what he rebranded “Diddly Squat”.
“They were interviewing other people to play my role on Clarkson’s Farm,” says Cooper. “It wasn’t until the last day of my contract that I got stopped at the bottom of the drive by the director. They asked me to go up and see Jeremy in the office and that’s when it all started.”
Why does Cooper think he was picked? “I don’t know. I didn’t ask questions. They needed someone to fill that role on the farm and I’d been doing it for three years so it made sense to stick with me, I suppose. Nobody knew that me and Jeremy were going to click as well as we did.”
The relationship between Cooper and Clarkson – characterised by their nicknames for each other, The Foetus and The Fossil – is certainly a large part of the show’s success. They argue incessantly: sometimes affectionately, at other times properly losing their tempers.
But despite being wildly different on paper – Clarkson the opinionated petrolhead who has travelled to almost every country on Earth; Cooper doesn’t even own a passport – there is a friendship here and a mutual respect. Clarkson has now promoted Cooper to farm manager.
“We’ve got similar personalities,” says Cooper. “We both work incredibly hard. I speak my mind, he speaks his mind. I want to do it my way and he wants to do it his way. We go back and forth and I always win in the end, so it’s fine. At the end of the day, Jeremy takes farming very seriously. He was very much a novice in the first series but we’ve got pigs in this series and I would go so far as to say he’s a really good pig farmer.”
We go back and forth and I always win in the end, so it’s fine
Along with the entertainment value of Clarkson’s Farm and its relatable characters, the show also has a serious side. It has been praised for its unflinching look at the troubles farmers face due to the loss of EU subsidies post-Brexit and climate change. Clarkson was even hailed a “hero” recently by a French farmer who tweeted praise for the show while protesting over his own government’s lack of support.
“Farmers are having an extremely hard time. We need people to talk about it,” Cooper says. “The subsidies were there to make food cheap for the public. That’s been taken away and the Government have gone, ‘Hang on a minute, we’ve got a bit of a problem,’ because food prices are rising and people are moaning about that.
“I happily spend 60 per cent of my wages on food rather than TVs or mobile phones because that’s what keeps me alive and I want it to be good quality, but people have got used to food being cheap. Take milk. Supermarkets have been controlling the dairy industry for way too long. They make a loss on milk, because that’s what brings people to the supermarket. And who pays the cost of that? The dairy farmer. The supermarkets don’t care about losing a few pennies, but the dairy industry is on its knees.”
Cooper doesn’t hold much faith in the ability of politicians to sort out the issues: “If a farmer says he’s going to go out and plough a field, he’s going to go out and plough a field. They get stuff done. The politician says, ‘I’m going to do this’ and it doesn’t happen. That’s the difference. The Government are all talk.”
His dream is to one day buy a farm where he can continue to raise his children Oscar, three, and Willa, nine months, despite his new-found fame leading to a six-week theatre tour, and his name being linked to I’m a Celebrity. Nor has his head been turned by all the female attention. He plans to marry fiancée Taya next year and says Clarkson will probably be best man “depending on how nice he is over the next year”.
“I think people take life too seriously, so I’m happy when they want to chat to me and I’m not offended by a bit of flirting,” he says. “I’ve been with my partner for eight years, so I know which side my bread is buttered on.
“And one day I’ll do I’m a Celeb, but I haven’t even got a passport yet and I’ve got 200 cows to look after! Jeremy and I do talk a lot about travel because he’s been around the world and his influence is rubbing off a bit. I went to Cornwall for a week with the kids last year, which was fun, and I think I would like to see Scotland.”
What about a trip abroad? “Let’s go one step at a time, shall we?” he says. “I had a panic attack on tour in Manchester because I was so far from home. I’m thinking it would be good to see the world, but there’s a fear that if I go any further than Chipping Norton, I’m not going to get home in time for supper.
“I’m just very happy showing the world what I love doing the very most, which is farming. People wake up in the morning and have a coffee to get going in the morning – I wake up and go and farm, that’s my caffeine.”
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