“The series is warm-hearted and great fun”
“The series is warm-hearted and great fun, fruitily narrated by Simon Callow. All of the participants have entered into it with gusto. We can ogle at the gorgeousness of the houses but the general theme is that they are ruinously expensive to maintain, while their owners are asset-rich but cash poor. All in all, a good bit of PR for the posh.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph
“It was all great fun, and the producers didn’t need to over-egg it with a string quartet on the soundtrack, scraping their way through hits by Abba and Lady Gaga. Downton Abbey this was not, even though Renishaw Hall does have a butler.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail
“This uncritical documentary demanded nothing more of the viewer than a fascination with the lives of the rich and vaguely famous: it did not pretend to be a warts-and-all profile of Britain’s most privileged classes. Instead, it was a love letter to plummy misfits negotiating a world very different from that of their forebears. Downton fans will have lapped it up.”
Ed Power, The i
“What surprised me about the poshos in Keeping Up with the Aristocrats was how much they reminded me of Steph and Dom from Gogglebox. Hence the slightly comic tone and the earthy swearing. But they were, in the most part, likeable, especially Princess Olga Romanoff, a cracking, libidinous eccentric who swore like a navvy and practically stroked the handsome, medalled military man sitting next to her at Lord Ivar Mountbatten’s Jean-Christophe Novelli dinner.”
Carol Midgley, The Times
“To watch Lord Mountbatten and his husband James stress about finding enough tablecloth underlays to equip the one-night-only, £165-a-head pop-up restaurant they have hired Jean-Christophe Novelli to preside over is to know 27 types of catharsis at once, followed by a deep, deep peace. ‘I could not,’ you think serenely, gazing into the middle distance from the sofa, ‘care less. Let the whole thing fail. Let them eat Greggs. It would matter – unlike almost everything else in this burning hellscape of a world – not one jot.’”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian
“The series could easily have been lost amid the avalanche of agrarian telly, but Big Farming Adventure struck a memorable tone by highlighting the sheer day-to-day slog of farming. There were sheep to be sheared, fields to be tilled, runaway rabbits to be rounded up. None of it looked like much of a hoot and the fun came from the fish-out-of-water aspect of Fletcher’s adventures.”
Ed Power, The i
“It is Kelvin Fletcher’s squeamishness and his no-nonsense neighbour Gilly’s withering scorn that will make this series. I was surprised to find it genuinely funny when, to wind him up, Gilly chased him with one of the maggots and Fletcher was really quite narked. Obviously it’s a copycat series, but Fletcher really has bought a 120-acre farm in the Peak District and he really does look way out of his depth. The sad truth is, it will be a much better series if it all goes wrong.”
Carol Midgley, The Times
“It’s impossible to describe Kelvin’s Big Farming Adventure as anything other than a shameless rip-off of Clarkson’s Farm. 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.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph
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