Finally finished season 2.
It's such an enjoyable show.
I'm a huge supporter of regulation, but fuck me, the ridiculous lengths farmers have to go through. And the West Oxfordshire council are utter twats.
One comment I read about the repeated refusals for Clarkson's applications to diversify the business was that the Cotswolds is an AONB in large part due to the activity of farmers. But if those farmers are put out of business, a lot of the land will be snapped up by housing developers. And, given how this government views things like planning restrictions as barriers for their donors to make huge profits (and Labour have also announced they will cut back building restrictions on greenbelt), they wouldn't be AONB's for long.
Letting farmers use farm buildings to diversify into other activities linked to farming/food production should be a no-brainer (but then, Clarkson gets a guarantee of immediate success due to his fame; whereas Harry Barleymow 5 miles away would struggle to get anything like the publicity and footfall)
When we were driving back from Portsmouth after an overnight ferry from France last month, we planned to stop off somewhere round the Cotswolds for a spot of lunch and, as we were going to be passing close to Chipping Norton, decided to detour past Diddly Squat. They had the second field/car park open, but it was traffic bedlam. Only for a couple hundred yards around the entrance, and it's on a pretty minor road anyway, but the number of people visiting was nuts. We drove past, turned, came back and stopped briefly (nobody was behind us) to get a couple of pics, but I wasn't sacrificing a couple of hours to buy some very overpriced things.