Kelvin Fletcher says being in ‘Emmerdale’ didn’t prepare him for the realities of farming.
Kelvin Fletcher says playing a farmer on Emmerdale didn't prepare him for the realities
The ex ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ star opted to forgo playing farmer Andy Sugden in the ITV1 soap after two decades and went on to pursue an agricultural life on his 120-acre farm in the Peak District, on which he has an array of animals, such as sheep, pigs, goats and alpacas with his wife Liz Marsland, 32, and their four kids Marnie, six, Milo, four, and 17-month-old twins Mateusz and Maximus.
But he claims life in the show's Yorkshire Dales did not provide him a transferable “skill set”.
The 39-year-old actor told OK! magazine: “I wish it did. I once said that what I know about farming you could write on the back of a stamp. I used to love filming those scenes but very rarely were the scenes about farming.
"The irony is that I played a farmer for 20 years and pretended to be one, and now I’m doing that. It’s just a bit bizarre isn’t it? But there’s no skill set I can transfer.”
Kelvin admitted he and Liz have been on a “journey” learning about farming, but it wasn't a career they had planned for themselves.
He said: “We’ve really been on a journey. We’re not experts by any stretch, but we’re really taking this seriously and we’re enjoying it.
“We’ve got four children, 150 sheep, five goats, 36 pigs, three alpacas with three more coming next week – and a dog and a cat. We didn’t really plan to farm. We found ourselves with a few sheep and then it snowballed from there. Everyone always used to tell us, ‘Farming is just a way of life’ and that’s truly the only way to describe it.”
Tagged in Kelvin Fletcher