Strictly champ Kelvin Fletcher and his wife Liz on juggling four kids and a flock of sheep on their Peak District plot: After 20 years on Emmerdale… Now I’m a real farmer

• READ MORE: Kelvin Fletcher insists his life as a father of four on his Peak District farm is a far cry from the glitz and glamour of his former showbiz life

There can’t be many people who’ve lost sleep because the Olivier Awards, the biggest night in British theatre, are held bang in the middle of lambing season. 

But Kelvin Fletcher, who played Andy Sugden in Emmerdale for 20 years and lifted the Strictly glitterball in 2019, and his actress wife Liz, best known as Cold Feet’s Rosemary, were seized with panic when they were invited to the event in April 2022.

In their previous life as jobbing actors they’d have skipped off to the Royal Albert Hall in their finery. This time it was different. 

Not only did they have to find a babysitter for their two young children, they also had to work out what to do with a shedful of ewes who were getting ready to lamb. 

The first rule of sheep farming, they’d been told when they bought a 120-acre farm on the edge of the Peak District in 2020, is that you need to be present round the clock in the lambing season.

Kelvin Fletcher (pictured with his family), who played Andy Sugden in Emmerdale for 20 years and lifted the Strictly glitterball in 2019, and his actress wife Liz, bought a 120-acre farm

In addition, Liz was heavily pregnant – with twins, to boot – but the couple did go to the awards ceremony, although other attendees might have wondered why Kelvin kept looking at his phone. ‘He’d put a webcam in the sheep shed so he could keep an eye on the ewes,’ says Liz.

As they peered at the grainy webcam footage, they realised, to their horror, that at least one of four newborn lambs wasn’t suckling. 

Liz recalls the pair of them sitting on their hotel bed, still in their glad rags, watching her brother-in-law – not a farmer, but hastily summoned to help – chasing the ewes around the shed while Kelvin shouted instructions down the phone.

They got the first train home from London the next morning, and back in the farm kitchen Liz asked herself, ‘Are we secretly more at home in our wellies than in black tie get-up?’ The conclusion? ‘We were definitely farmers now.’

It’s three years since Kelvin bought the farm, almost on a whim. He and Liz, with their children Marnie and Milo, were resolute townies. He’d never set foot on a farm until he started work on Emmerdale.

Also, having just won Strictly, he seemed to have the entertainment world at his feet and was actually planning with Liz to move to LA to take his acting career to the next level. 

But then lockdown hit, the diary emptied and one day Kelvin spotted a farm with a ‘for sale’ sign, and fell in love. Life lurched in the most unlikely direction.

In January 2021 Kelvin was mulling over some programme ideas with a TV producer and mentioned the farm, almost in passing. 

The producer thought it sounded like a sitcom – a modern-day The Good Life – and suggested this should be his next television project, having cameras follow the couple’s progress. A BBC series, Kelvin’s Big Farming Adventure, duly followed.

Viewers might have suspected that Kelvin’s foray into farming would be a fleeting one. He barely knew one end of a sheep from the other, and at one point, as he was shown how to deal with maggots in a hoof, he slid to the floor in a near faint.

Now, though? A completely new series, Fletcher’s Family Farm on ITV, picks up the story – and what a transformation! The first episode features Kelvin with his arm up a sheep’s rear end. Once the idea might have made him retch, but now he’s a pro.

It’s three years since Kelvin bought the farm, almost on a whim. He and Liz (pictured), with their children Marnie and Milo, were resolute townies. He’d never set foot on a farm until he started work on Emmerdale

Not that you rush in at the first sign of waters breaking, he explains today. Farmers only intervene if they can see a ewe is in distress, or sense something is wrong. Now, mostly, he can. 

‘I think there’s something inherent in human instinct that makes you know when you have to intervene. It surprised me, to be honest, but when you have that connection to animals, to the seasons, to the weather, it changes everything.’

Last time I interviewed Kelvin – before viewers had seen him in farmer mode – he was convinced his new adventure would run alongside his acting career. Now, he sounds like a farmer first, actor second. 

Yet he had a two-month stint at the National Theatre in Jack Absolute Flies Again last year, and filmed episodes of two TV dramas, The Teacher and McDonald & Dodds. Liz has just completed a stint in Hollyoaks.

‘Filling out that bit on forms when they ask for your occupation is what gives me anxiety these days,’ admits Kelvin, 39. ‘I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I’m a farmer, actor, father, househusband… Liz is the same. We’re both fulfilling a lot of roles.’

Liz, 40, says sometimes she does a double take when she catches sight of herself while dashing to do the school run – invariably in her mud-splattered wellies. ‘I feel overdressed now if I’m not in my wellies,’ she says. ‘But I’m actually really happy when I have no make-up on and my hair in a topknot. I’m a farmer now, and I like it.’

Kelvin has been teasing a possible return to Emmerdale on social media, but does he have time? And as the new show’s title suggests, Liz and the children have a more central role. Marnie is now seven and Milo four, and they’re quite at home planting their own seeds (self-sufficiency is the next Fletcher goal).

Which brings us onto another script development – the arrival of the twins, Mateusz Kelvin and Maximus Crowther (named in memory of Kelvin’s best friend Steven Crowther, who died from a heart attack in 2016 aged just 39). 

Happily, Kelvin didn’t have to deliver them himself. Indeed, when Liz went into labour, she drove herself to hospital, leaving Kelvin to get the other children and all the animals breakfasted.

The new show follows the chaos as they try to grapple farm life with four children. ‘It is chaotic, sometimes overwhelming,’ says Kelvin. ‘But as I keep saying to Liz, there will be a day – maybe when the kids leave home – when we will feel more relaxed. I’m sure people will say, “How are they managing all this?” But it’s brilliant. We’re happy, fulfilled, excited.’ Exhausted, surely? ‘That too,’ says Liz. ‘But when you have two kids you kind of know what you’re doing by the time number three and four come along.’

Kelvin’s Strictly training has been a godsend, they say. It sounds daft but the principles of ‘throwing yourself in at the deep end and just teaching yourself’ are the same for farming as flamenco. ‘We don’t have that background. We can’t call mum or dad to ask. We’ve had to learn on the job and do it ourselves,’ says Kelvin.

Are they making money from the farm? Kelvin says it is a commercial enterprise, ‘so we aren’t just hobby farmers, although there’s nothing wrong with that’, and he stresses they are growing the farm.

They have a flock of rare-breed Cotswold sheep as well as chickens, alpacas, rabbits and pigs. The new show features some very cute piglets, but also cringeworthy moments when Kelvin and Liz (on Valentine’s Day too!) have a first stab at artificially inseminating one of their pigs. Did you know that boar semen can arrive in the post, with instructions about how not to get it on your shoes? They didn’t either, but they do now.

‘In life you have those moments when you’re on a trajectory that makes you think, “How did we get here?”’ laughs Kelvin. ‘But there’s nowhere else we’d rather be.’

Fletcher’s Family Farm begins on 15 October at 11.30am on ITV1 and 7pm on ITVBe

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