Jeremy Clarkson Was “Maybe” Close To Death After Recent Health Scare

“Crikey, that was close,” is how now ex-The Grand Tour star Jeremy Clarkson summed up a recent health scare. Writing in his Sunday Times column, explaining why his words had been absent from the paper for the previous few weeks, Clarkson said he’d been on holiday in “A small island in the Indian Ocean,” when he’d started to feel a little worse for wear.

After jumping from a boat and swimming to shore, Clarkson described feeling more tired than usual. He was unable to “descend a flight of stairs, not without holding someone’s hand,” and despite resting up for the rest of the holiday “drinking wine and eating cheese,” all was not well upon returning to the UK.

Having initially ignored a clamminess plus a tightness in his chest, the former Top Gear host loaded “30 pigs into the slaughterhouse school bus” on his farm, and then noticed “pins and needles in my left arm.”

With the recent death by heart attack of former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond in his mind, Clarkson called a doctor and was soon on his way to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

Thankfully, the symptoms weren’t the beginnings of a heart attack but were caused by a blocked artery. A doctor inserted a stent in his arm, described by Clarkson as “a sort of Brillo pad that’s used to keep the blood vessels open,” to clear things up.

The procedure, which Clarkson labelled as not “especially painful” but “just odd,” took around two hours. “Was I days from death? Maybe,” the column’s title notes. In the end, though, he was able to return home. And perhaps to contemplate series five of Clarkson’s Farm, which, while not confirmed, seems likely considering the enormous popularity of the first four outings.

The Grand Tour’s emotional final episode (above), meanwhile, came out in September.