‘I went to Clarkson’s Farm and found 7 ‘fake’ things you won’t see on TV’

Diddly Squat Farm is back open for business, with the UK’s most famous farm shop finally reopening for the new season this March. Made famous on ‘s smash hit show , the shop on site famously draws huge crowds every year, even before it had a proper car park – and I was one of the many who went to visit.

With three wildly popular seasons of already available and series 4 and 5 confirmed, there’s no doubt Diddly Squat will once again be inundated with visitors in 2025 after it reopened on March 1. But while a new series is on the cards, it might have a hard time topping my visit to Diddly Squat Farm, and all the insider secrets I learned from my trip down to the motoring journalist turned farmer’s Oxfordshire plot in Chipping Norton. I hopped in the car, drove two hours to the countryside location, and learned quite a lot about what happens on Clarkson’s Farm when the Amazon Prime Video cameras stop rolling.

Lisa Hogan does not staff the shop till and Kaleb Cooper isn’t on site

Jeremy Clarkson’s former model Northern Irish girlfriend, , who also stars in Clarkson’s Farm alongside him, must staff the till at some point because there’s footage of her behind the counter in Clarkson’s Farm series 1 and 2.

But on our visit – and a lot of others I’ve seen – there were several staff members that had nothing to do with the TV show and had clearly been hired to staff the shop during the time between filming. So if you’re taking a trip to Clarkson’s Farm hoping to see Lisa, Jeremy or Kaleb, you’re not definitely going to be disappointed, but you probably are.

The Diddly Squat Farm Shop sign is cardboard

The magic of TV! It looks like a no-expense spared shiny wooden sign welcoming folk to Diddly Squat Farm Shop. But in fact, the now famous signage, which has since had an Amazon Fresh food delivery logo added, is made with cardboard lettering.

I know, because I stood next to it for a photo and the A in Farm had been bent down. I reached out to touch it and was surprised to find it’s mere corrugated cardboard lettering nailed to the wood.

The Farm Shop is really tiny

One person I spoke to inside the farm shop described it as “the size of a postage stamp”. That might be an exaggeration, but it really is small inside, which is why people queue for hours just to have the chance to walk through it for a few minutes. I personally queued for 90 minutes on a sunny May day. In terms of the usable floor space, the whole thing is probably no more than about 10ft by 8ft. It hardly looks like the Sistine Chapel on camera, but you can’t get a sense of how tiny it is until you’re stood (crammed) inside it, shuffling around in a slow line between hundreds of others.

The ‘TV set’ is very different to the tourist attraction

On Amazon Prime Video, the shop and the farm space are carefully and neatly managed. There are tidy rows of stock and nothing on the walls behind the till.

In real life, the shop is absolutely packed with both stock and souvenirs – tea towels with stuff like ‘The Best Farm …In The World’ are draped across every surface. There are piles of posters and postcards at the till, and there are even knitted dolls of Jeremy and Kaleb sitting on a shelf behind the till. Other items like Diddly Squat Gin and a freezer full of ice cream aren’t seen on the show. It would appear the place is ‘dressed’ for TV filming, and then all the bells and whistles for tourists are put inside once filming is over and visitors are invited to come to clean the place out.

Outside, there are portable toilets put up in the car park, and several overflow emergency car parks are open and allowing cars in, none of which is seen on the programme, and nor are the two-hour queues of people lining up along the grass outside the shop. Sure, there have been times when we’ve seen the farm busy on the TV programme, but I don’t recall ever seeing queues of people in the field – yet I learned there are long lines daily during the time it’s open to the public.

Jeremy Clarkson’s humour remains visible everywhere though. A Hawkstone delivery van says ‘Urgent Delivery’ on the bonnet, but it’s written backwards so it can be read from a rear view mirror – like an ambulance. It’s been three series now and I’ve still never seen that appear on camera yet.

Speaking to a fellow visitor who told me she’s a regular customer to the farm shop, she said that during very busy periods like half terms, there’s a ‘pop up shop’ set up behind the farm shop building to serve more customers.

There’s a burger van serving food

Another thing you didn’t see at all on the first two series is that there’s a burger van, a bar serving beer and cider and even a local lavender flower seller all set up on the tables in the lambing shed. Again, it feels like it’s set up differently for the non-filming periods, but there’s a lot packed into the space that was never once shown on camera (update: the Burger Van is briefly seen in season 3, as is some of the local selling on the tables in the lambing shed).

There are also messages from Jeremy pinned up on the side of the lambing shed – and you should bring a pen with you

Another thing never shown on camera is the set of signs that adorn the side of the lambing shed, communicating messages to people queueing for the bustling farm shop.

Several laminated signs are stapled to the wall with messages about how Jeremy is from Yorkshire, or explaining that the “pheasants have red cheeks because they’ve eaten my wasabi”. Around them, there are literally thousands of messages scrawled on the planks of wood from farm visitors, with everything from ‘James May is a d***o” to ‘We love Pepper’ (the cow Jeremy decided to keep as a pet). It left me wondering if James is planning on scrubbing them all off – as some are quite rude – before filming resumes or the cameras will simply be kept away from the shed walls for series 3

There’s a campsite right next door

Standing at the campsite entrance, you can literally read the farm shop sign. It would appear that the campsite isn’t Jeremy’s property, which would explain why it isn’t promoted on the show. Jeremy makes reference to a campsite nearby in Season 1, where he explains to Charlie Ireland that he could kill by selling farm produce to campers next door. But it’s not mentioned at all in Season 2, and I didn’t recognise the below sign as it’s never been shown on TV, and I didn’t expect it to be SO close by. It’s literally a stone’s throw away, and there’s no way you’d know that from watching the programme. It’s almost like the camera angles are pointed to avoid capturing it at all.

Of course, it’s a TV show, so it’s absolutely to be expected that things are moved around for filming, that the shop is redesigned for its time on camera, or that when Jeremy makes an announcement that the farm is open for visitors, some things will need to be put in place to make it work on a large scale when the cameras aren’t rolling. So I’m certainly not suggesting anyone’s being deceived, but it was interesting to get a peek behind the scenes and see what it was really like on the ground – and the reality is a little different to watching it on TV!

While the farm shop was pricey, I thoroughly enjoyed the trip and there really aren’t many opportunities in the UK to walk straight onto a TV set from an international streaming hit – and eat your souvenirs afterwards.