A millionaire is losing money on sheep, and it is the most honest show about work on television.

There is a millionaire on your television losing money on sheep, and you cannot stop watching him. Clarkson's Farm is back for a fifth season, and it remains, improbably, one of the most-watched portraits of work that Britain currently makes: a show in which a wealthy man learns, week after week, that farming is brutally hard, barely pays, and turns on people and forces well beyond his control — the weather, the supermarkets, the rules, the price of a lamb on the day he has to sell it.

The format has not changed and does not need to. Jeremy Clarkson is still the wrong man for the job, which is the joke and also the point; Kaleb Cooper is still the young farmer who knows what he is doing and says so. This run, the farm runs into the fallout from a government budget that landed hard on agriculture, some costly attempts at making the place more efficient, and the sort of setbacks, to animals and to people, that farming hands out without sentiment. Beneath the comedy it is an honest education in a kind of work most of the country has never done and increasingly never sees.

That is the mirror worth looking into. We watch this in our millions from the sofa, at the end of days spent in front of screens doing work that produces nothing you can hold, feed, or stand in a field and point at. Clarkson's Farm sells, more than laughs, a fantasy of tangible labour — work whose output is a real lamb, a real harvest, a real flood to deal with, success and failure you can see with your own eyes. It is the opposite of the abstract, dematerialised, faintly unreal work a lot of us now do, and that contrast is most of its pull.

There is an irony the show only half-admits. The reason Clarkson can farm at a loss and turn it into entertainment is that the farming is not really the income; the watching is. He has done what many a struggling enterprise now does — turned the work into content and monetised the audience rather than the output. The lambs do not pay. We do. And in that, oddly, it is a truer picture of the modern economy than it intends to be: a country quietly discovering that the thing that pays is rarely the thing that is useful.

None of which stops it being warm, funny and, in places, moving — the affection among the cast is real, and the precariousness of British farming it keeps stumbling into is the most serious thing on light television right now. It earns the evening it asks for.

Watch it for Kaleb, stay for the accidental economics lesson, and notice the longing underneath your own enjoyment: not for Clarkson's life exactly, but for work you could see the end of, and touch.

Worth your evening: all five seasons are on Prime Video, the new run among them. No need to have followed from the start — each season stands on its own, though the first is where the bond between Clarkson and Kaleb is built. Best taken an episode at a time, not binged.