Kelvin Fletcher and his wife, Liz, could have had a completely different future altogether.

Kelvin Fletcher and his wife, Liz, had dreams of moving to America before deciding to run a farm, but their plans did not go ahead due to the COVID pandemic. Speaking to  James Martin on his cooking show, the couple admitted running their own farm was not in the pipeline at all.

As James congratulated them on their new series, Kelvin explained, “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 TV chef pointed out, “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 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 his attention to their move to America, James said, “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 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’.

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

“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 in Emmerdale, Kelvin said they had no previous farming experience.

“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 shared.

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

“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 added, “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.”