A television personality with no farming experience buys a farm and attempts to run it, with often comical results. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s impossible to describe Kelvin’s Big Farming Adventure (BBC One) as anything other than a shameless rip-off of Clarkson’s Farm. “This is the side you don’t see all too often, isn’t it?” said Kelvin Fletcher, as he wrestled with a sheep. Well, only if you don’t have an Amazon subscription enabling you to watch the infinitely superior Jeremy Clarkson series.
Fletcher, the former Emmerdale actor and 2019 Strictly Come Dancing winner, is a lifelong townie. Why has he bought 120 acres on the edge of the Peak District? A cynic might say it’s because these situations are ripe for fly-on-the-wall television shows.
We saw Fletcher buying a shiny new tractor and encountering sheep for the first time. Where Clarkson has local Kaleb Cooper as his sidekick, Fletcher has neighbour Jilly to dispense no-nonsense advice. At one point she declared him “a blinkin’ wuss”.
Certainly, he has no clue what he’s doing. The voiceover (provided by Maxine Peake, whose agent is earning their commission this month) informs us that Fletcher has only a week to learn about livestock, inserting an obligatory note of jeopardy.
Fletcher tells us that it’s imperative for the farm to be commercially viable – “hopefully it’ll be earning some money in a year” – but we’ve learned from Clarkson’s Farm just how difficult that is. How much did his shiny John Deere tractor cost? We weren’t told.
There was the merest hint of tension when Fletcher’s wife, Liz, said he was someone who can’t deal with things going wrong, and has no Plan B. She appears to be shouldering none of the responsibility and just hovers about commentating on his efforts.
“Do you want this lifestyle?” Liz asked. “Yeah,” he said, half-heartedly, like a man who had lost a pound and found a penny. You had to feel a bit sorry for him, really, as he scraped maggots from a sheep with footrot – it’s a long way from the Strictly ballroom.
