Fans of Clarkson’s Farm will know that the sidekick Kaleb Cooper does not have happy experiences of London. Before the Prime series began he had been only once, on a school art trip, and he stayed on the coach. And when he drove to the capital to deliver Jezzer-grown wasabi to high-end restaurants he got lost and racked up eye-watering parking fines. At first he is just as ill at ease in his one-man show. Or as he puts it himself: “I’m slightly shitting it.”
Visibly nervous, stumbling over his words, presiding over lame video inserts of tractor driving, he seems lost on the big Cambridge Theatre stage, which normally hosts Matilda the Musical. He needs his wingman, the big JC, the ego to his id, you feel. An evening’s entertainment cannot live by ruddy cheeks alone and his act looks in danger of expiring in front of us.
But he gets away with it. While on the face of it he urgently needs a gag writer to fill in the longueurs, that just wouldn’t be his style. The packed audience came to see the ordinary man made good, the lad who started farming chickens before he turned 13 and seems the sort of person upon which this country was built. His success is no accident, you quickly realise, and as he takes us through his life you get a strong sense of the entrepreneurial smarts that burn within him like the sun on his famously receding hairline at harvest time.
He has two books to his name, has chatted with Rishi Sunak in the Downing Street garden, but he won’t change. He is probably not what Sartre had in mind when he wrote about authenticity, but it’s certainly there in a night during which it sometimes feels like he has invited you into his Chipping Norton local for a game of darts and a chinwag. He is also an eloquent evangelist for farming rights, something that brought the biggest cheers of the night, and it’s a subject on which he speaks a lot of sense. As he frequently reminds his London audience, at least he knows where food comes from.
At the close he invited audience members for a silly game of toy tractor racing called Kaleb’s Grand Turnip, one of whom happened to be Jodie Kidd (she lost, by the way). Celebrities clearly just fall into his lap. And he ended it with a singalong to the Wurzels’ (cough) classicThe Combine Harvester. Unplanned, thinly scripted, barely even a show, really — but our man just has the F factor. Ooh arr.
★★★☆☆
140min
To March 10, www.kaleblive.com
