Kelvin Fletcher opens up on ‘life-changing’ plans to sell house and move with wife

Kelvin Fletcher wasn’t meant to buy a farm(Image: (Image: ITV))

Kelvin Fletcher and his wife, Liz, had dreams of uprooting their lives and moving to America.

During a recurring guest appearance on James Martin’s cooking show that aired today, the couple disclosed that running a farm had never been part of their initial plans.

When James extended his congratulations on their new series, Kelvin revealed: “The back end of last year, we finished series three, and then we’re already straight on with series four, so that’s coming out very soon.”

The celebrated TV chef quipped: “So you can’t really complain about it because it was your idea to do the filming in the first place.”

The former soap actor replied: “We just kind of thought, it’s hopefully of interest. It’s interesting to us and our journey into farming and to this new life, and then, we kind of pitched the idea, and thankfully, ITV thought it was a good idea, too, and four series later, we’re still doing it.”

Turning attention to their abandoned transatlantic ambitions, James pointed out: “Just to recap, the reason why you got the farm in the first place was no reason whatsoever. You were originally going to go to America. This was a life-changing thing you decided, and you got the visas and everything, didn’t you?”

Kelvin and Liz Fletcher had plans to move to America(Image: (Image: ITV))

Liz chipped in: “As two actors, we thought, you know, Kelvin had been in Emmerdale for 20 years, and we kind of wanted to try something different, and as two actors, we thought, ‘Well, why not? Let’s go to Hollywood and LA and see what happens’.

“And we only had two children at the time, but unfortunately, Covid stopped that, and they actually stopped the visas. We never got the visas completed because they said, ‘There’ll be a pause on this for at least two years’.

“But we’d mentally moved on, hadn’t we? We sold the house, and we were like, ‘Well, what are we going to do now?’ And that’s when we saw the farm, and it’s literally that that sprung the idea.”

Despite playing a farmer on Emmerdale, Kelvin openly confessed that neither of them had any real-life farming experience whatsoever.

Kelvin and Liz Fletcher run a farm in Cheshire(Image: ITV)

“That’s the irony, James, is that I was playing a farmer for 20 years, but as you’ll know, with soaps, we did very little farming,” he revealed.

“It was more, I think, shooting people with shotguns, going to prison, getting married three or four times. That I was more accustomed to, but when you think of it like that, it sounds crazy, but kind of life has imitated art, and that’s a little bit of what people used to say, there’s an obvious connection there.

“You played a farmer in Emmerdale, you’re not living this farming life, and we’d never seen it like that.”

Kelvin went on to say: “You know, as Liz said, we’d had this dream of going to America. It didn’t kind of pan out. And from Los Angeles to the Peak District, it’s probably not an obvious connection.”