Sally Allen: Agatha Christie can give Torbay tourism a bit of Clarkson magic

Love him or hate him, and I used not to like him due to his outstanding arrogance, I must admit that Jeremy Clarkson is bloody brilliant.

He has fought the system and put a much-needed spotlight on the struggling British farming industry.

Clarkson, known throughout the UK for his time on Top Gear and more recently The Grand Tour, five years ago swapped driving fast cars for combine harvesters and tractors as he embarked upon a pretty much, full-on career in farming.

Nobody thought that it would work and no doubt a vast number of doubting Thomases thought he would fall flat on his face. How wrong everyone who doubted him have been. He is definitely having the last laugh.

Clarkson's Farm was born on Amazon Prime Video and has so far brought us three seasons of this unlikely hit documentary series and a fourth is very much on the way.

It does show the trials, tribulations and often heartbreak of farming together with Jezza’s mistakes and triumphs, but his staying power shines through.

Known for his stiletto acerbic wit, Clarkson has now also shown us his rather vulnerable under belly. Who would have thought that this 6’5” hulk would have sobbed at little piglets passing away.

Because he has never ever shrunk from telling it exactly as he sees it, and never given a thought to the offence he might cause, amazingly his whole career has even been enhanced by his well-known rudeness.

This is unique in media circles. He even managed to get away with only a tap across the knuckles with his summing up of Megan Markle! The man appears to be untouchable.

His appeal to me though is his motivation, putting his money where his mouth is, not being afraid to fail and true innovation against the odds. Magic!

Clarkson’s latest venture is his highly anticipated pub. This new Cotswolds watering hole, The Farmer's Dog, opened its doors to the public last bank holiday weekend. Located around 20 minutes away from his 1,000 acre Diddly Squat Farm, the new pub will be serving up a selection of his own Hawkstone lager or ciders and various traditional pub meals, all created from local farm produce.

He is even serving Cornish tea, something I have yet to try. The queues to go to this new watering hole are guaranteed to be huge.

Clarkson says, "If I take one of our pigs and we slaughter it and butcher it and we turn it into sausages and we sell it here, it costs us 74 pence. If I buy imported pig meat it is 18 pence. So, something is wrong with the food system in this country.”

He also revealed that he'd looked at roughly 40 pubs before deciding on the Farmers Dog, saying he needed 'some very special things like a big car park. Lots of parking, and no little roads to get to it.

"There are no villagers to p**s off here. There’s no-one to annoy. It’s a good spot," he added. The Farmer's Dog is on the A40 in the village of Asthall, near Burford, in the Cotswolds, but if your name is Sir Keir Starmer, don’t bother to make the journey because Clarkson has already banned you!

Clarkson is a one-off character, but that shouldn’t deter others from having a-go at creating innovative hospitality ideas to draw tourists to our neck of the woods. Everything needs the oxygen of publicity to get off the ground and Torbay desperately needs some good and creative ideas to get ourselves featuring in the media.

We can’t rely on just our beautiful coastline, there needs to be a number of good-feel stories, which will make people want to come and experience the Bay for themselves. All the coastal resorts promote themselves in a similar way, so Torbay needs to think outside the box and be far more innovative in getting featured in, what used to be, the page 3 of newspapers, not the advertisement pages.

Sadly, we don’t have Jeremy Clarkson living here to draw the crowds, but we need to think of something that makes us stand out. What we do have, which no other UK resort has, is a highly revered international brand and asset, namely Agatha Christie. My passion is to make the Pavilion a centre to celebrate her and the genre she single-handedly began, the female criminal novelist.

The building would be ideal as a central point in the UK to celebrate this remarkable woman, and by association, this embraces so many theatrical celebrities, who are all know to be avid Christie fans. Add to this the fans who have read over 100 million of her books and plays in 100 countries and 100 languages, and of course the vast number of films and TV series derived from her writing watched world-wide, and you have a door waiting to be swung open to a marketing bonanza of a worldwide attraction.

You only have to consider that The Mousetrap has been running in the West End since 1952, with just a short break for Covid. Phenomenal! Torbay has the potential to boom big time.

Of course, when all these tourists do turn up, we need to make sure that our Bay is welcoming and easy to get around, and most importantly, offering lots of good and easy parking.

With this in mind, it was great news when leader of the Council, Dave Thomas and his deputy, Chris Lewis decided to open up Torbay Road in Paignton to traffic after the previously mind-boggling decision to make it a pedestrian precinct. This was an overdue and very sensible decision to encourage commerce back to what had become a commercially dead area. 

Please, please, please can you now consider opening up Torquay top to bottom with a one-way traffic system with chevron parking all the way down one side of the road.

I promise you that this would vastly improve business for the hard-pressed shopkeepers and also bring some heart back to the town. It would have the added bonus of allowing disabled shoppers the opportunity to park near where they want to go, instead of a distance away in an extremely smelly and dangerous multi-storey car park. The current car parks are not for the faint-hearted, or those with even a below average sense of smell!

In the meantime, I will continue to watch the ups and downs of Clarkson’s Farm and hope that it sparks some ideas for a social phenomenon like the Farmer’s Dog or maybe, The Agatha Christie International Centre.