Kelvin Fletcher on 'life-changing' decision to sell up and move to America

Kelvin Fletcher and his wife, Liz, once harboured ambitions of relocating their lives to America. During a repeat guest spot on James Martin's cookery programme, which aired today, the pair revealed that operating a farm had never featured in their original plans.

When James offered his congratulations on their new series, Kelvin disclosed: "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 acclaimed TV chef joked: "So you can't really complain about it because it was your idea to do the filming in the first place."

The former soap star responded: "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," reports the Mirror.

Shifting focus to their shelved transatlantic dreams, James remarked, "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?"

Liz added: "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 portraying a farmer on Emmerdale, Kelvin candidly admitted that neither he nor his wife had any genuine farming experience whatsoever.

"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 explained.

"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 continued: "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."

James Martin's Saturday Morning is available to watch on ITVX.