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 self ie 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 mu
