Dubliner Lisa Hogan survived a plane crash, so being internationally-famous curmudgeon Jeremy Clarkson's partner should be a piece of cake, shouldn’t it? Lisa spoke to Miriam O’Callaghan about her career as a model and actress and how she gets one over on her partner during filming of Prime Video’s hit show, Clarkson’s Farm.
Getting to attached to the pigs was Lisa’s big mistake during filming of the last season of Clarkson’s Farm:
"Recently I’ve had a favourite piglet – pig Millie – and she was terribly badly bullied by her sisters and cousins. And when it was feeding time, she’d just wander down to the end of the hill and just kind of look down and just kind of go, 'No, no, I’m fine, I don’t need to eat.’ So I saved her."
Lisa brought Millie to another field, but farm manager Kaleb saw Millie and thought that she’d escaped and brought her back to her sisters and cousins and, well, farm things happened to them all:
"And they’ve all been brought off to market. So, I don’t think I’m going to have a favourite again. She’s gone... She was my little pet project, but she’s sausages now."
No, you’re crying. But wait, what about that whole surviving a plane crash thing? Well, long before Clarkson's Farm, Lisa was working as an actress and production staffer on Fierce Creatures, John Cleese’s sequel-but-not-a-sequel to A Fish Called Wanda. She was flying from Majorca to Northolt in West London for a production meeting when the plane overshot the runway and hit a van on a nearby dual carriageway:
"I was in foetal position, quite relaxed and I just thought, ‘Well, this is it. Okay, I’m going to be with my dad now.’ And everything was smashing around and when the plane finally stopped, the nose had come off, the truck had come through right in front of me, so it was just debris and the door had come off."
Lisa exited the plane on the wing and got down onto the road, where she sat, until a man came to check if she was alright. She asked to borrow his phone and rang the Fierce Creatures production team to say that she’d been stuck in a traffic jam and would be late for the meeting.
"And they found out the next day, obviously, when it was all over the papers and they said, ‘Why didn’t you say it was you?’ And I said, ‘Well, because I didn’t want to get into trouble.’"
Seeing her mother so devastated over the death of her father – who died when she was 14 – had led Lisa to be wary of falling in love with someone because she never wanted to be that devastated from their loss. But the plane crash changed things:
"Having the plane crash, I just thought, ‘Well, I could be the one to die first.’ It was like hoover dust lifting off my shoulders and I thought, ‘Oh, well let’s not worry about that then.’"
It’s also made her a fearless flyer on the reasonable basis that the odds of being in two plane crashes are extremely high. You might think that Lisa would need to be a bit on the fearless side to get into a relationship with Jeremy Clarkson, but she told Miriam that the car-mad farmer is actually pretty good at the relationship stuff:
"He’s very, very good company and he does make an effort to make me laugh a lot, which I really appreciate, and we do, we get on."
It was during filming of the first season of Clarkson’s Farm though that Lisa discovered how to make sure she got to say what she wanted to say – talk while the show was recording so he couldn’t talk over her:
"He couldn’t talk over me because he knew it would ruin the sound in the edit, so that was the only time I could really get my point across, when we had the mic on. He would talk over me normally, as in any couple, but with the mic on he couldn’t, so I would just let loose."
Miriam wondered if the farm would be a good place to have a wedding, should Lisa ever think about proposing to Jeremy...? Don't get your hopes up, is the message from Lisa:
"I would think the only husbandry happening on the farm at the moment is with Ajax, who is our boar, and we’ve just put him back in with the sows."
Can’t make it any clearer – in a tremendously farming sort of way – than that, can you?
You can hear Miriam’s full conversation with Lisa by clicking above.