Help! We Bought a Village

When we bought our first little cottage in France in 2019, appearing on television was probably about the furthest thing from our minds.

But things moved rather quickly.

By 2020, we had somehow gone from owning one little cottage to owning the majority of an abandoned French hamlet. Around that time, we spotted an advert looking for people who had bought multiple properties in Europe for a new television programme.

We thought, rather naively, that perhaps they might pay us to take part. With nine roofs eventually needing to be replaced, we were already mentally spending the money on roof timbers!

As it turned out, contributors don’t get paid to appear on the programme. But by then we thought, why not? We were planning to create holiday accommodation here at the village, so even if nothing else came of it, perhaps a little television exposure might one day help our fledgling gîte business.

And so, in 2021, the cameras arrived.

By then we owned most - but not quite all - of the hamlet. The final pieces of the puzzle were acquired while filming was already underway, meaning the programme actually captured part of our journey from owning a collection of abandoned buildings to becoming custodians of the entire village.

What we certainly didn’t realise was that those cameras would still be arriving five years later.

Filming has become an extraordinary part of life here. Roughly every seven to ten days, a crew joins us for a day and simply follows whatever happens to be going on at the village. There are no grand transformations manufactured for television - the work you see is the work we really are doing, and the successes, disasters, arguments, laughter and occasional questionable decision-making all come with it.

Help! We Bought a Village is broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, with each series airing every weekday in the late afternoon for around six weeks.

We were among the original contributors when the programme first began, appearing in the first five episodes of Series One and Two. From Series Three onwards, our story expanded to the first ten episodes of each series.

Somewhere along the way, something rather unexpected happened.

Our story seemed to strike a chord.

Perhaps it was the slightly ridiculous leap from renting a static mobile home in England to finding ourselves responsible for an entire abandoned French hamlet. Perhaps it was the scale of what we’d taken on. Or perhaps people simply enjoyed watching two ordinary blokes repeatedly discover that everything takes approximately four times longer than they thought it would.

Whatever the reason, viewers took us - and this crumbling little corner of Normandy - to their hearts.

It makes us cringe slightly to say it ourselves, but over the years we’ve often been described by viewers as the programme’s “flagship couple.” We’re enormously proud to have been part of Help! We Bought a Village from the very beginning, but even now it feels slightly surreal that something we originally agreed to because we thought it might help advertise a future gîte has resulted in people all over the world following our lives and the restoration of this place.

And perhaps the strangest part of all?

After five years of filming, having a television crew wandering around the village every week or so now feels completely normal.

Which, when we think about it, probably isn’t normal at all.