Place your bets on a Vegas staycation
Fans of Channel 4’s Glamping with Johnny Vegas may not know that the site is real – and you can stay there. Ed Grenby joins the comedian on a busman’s holiday in the Yorkshire Dales
One of my friends accuses me of making it up; another suggests gently that perhaps I dreamed it. A third, most damningly, says it sounds like one of Alan Partridge’s fatuous programme pitches, perhaps a sequel to his thankfully-never-made Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank. But no, Glamping with Johnny Vegas is real – and I’ve got the hangover to prove it.
If you’ve been watching his Channel 4 documentary – which reaches its nail-biting, bus-crashing finale this Wednesday – you will know the basics, but Johnny’s keen to share the backstory too. “It all started one drunken, foolish night a while back,” he says, “when I went online and bought this knackered old bus from Malta, with the idea of converting it into a kind of fancy campervan.”
Now, a couple of years and many missteps later, it is presiding over a field in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, flanked by another four vintage vehicles kitted out as overnight quarters. And (notvery-spoily spoiler alert) I have just woken up there.
It’s certainly a beautiful spot: Johnny’s Field of Dreams (yes, that’s its actual name) is part of Breaks Fold Farm, 225 acres of pretty green pasture on the edge of Nidderdale’s high moors. Louise and Richard – the third generation of his family to work the land here – keep sheep, cows, horses, chickens and a campsite surrounded by All Creatures Great and Small scenery. But that still leaves the question: why on earth did Johnny Vegas want to set up a glampsite there?
“I’ve been reasonably successful in my career,” he tells me in that familiar Lancashire rasp, “but nobody in my family has ever owned their own business, we’ve always worked for other people. As an actor, I’m kind of a gun for hire, just waiting for work to come in, and having to take jobs that don’t inspire me in order to provide for my family. It’s been a bit unsatisfactory recently, and that’s why doing up the bus and glampsite became so important to me: it was something where I was in charge of my own destiny.
“Plus there’s the stubbornness. Everyone told me this was a terrible idea, and they’ve always told me that. When I was going to be a priest: ‘Terrible idea’. A potter: ‘Terrible idea’. Stand-up comedy: ‘That is your worst idea’. But this time even my mum was sceptical. When I told her I was going to name the bus Patricia, after her, she said, ‘You’re not naming a dirty old bus after me.’ All of that just made me more determined: I wanted to show people that, OK, I failed as an artist, but I didn’t fail at this. I want to show people what I’m capable of when I’m taken seriously.”
His friends say they have never seen him more alive than when he was making the tiles for Patricia’s bathroom or glass for her light fittings, and he and the team working with him have created a real work of art inside the bus: inspired by Johnny’s favourite artist, Joan Miró (“I cried at his museum in Barcelona”), the interior has a real Mediterranean magical-surrealist feel, as fun as it is clever (six berths have somehow been squeezed in).
Each accommodation at the site, in fact, has its own distinctive character – from stolid 1960s German fire truck to hippie-ish classic yellow American school bus – but despite the big personalities involved (vehicular and human), it’s the location that’s the real star here.
Open the passenger door in the morning, and where your muscle memory tells you to expect a multi-storey car park, instead you will find 360-degree vistas of God’s own countryside, with nothing piercing the horizon but one old church way in the distance. (When a rainbow materialises later, I can see its whole miles-wide sweep, end to end, without a single object to spoil the view.)
The landscape round here is a double-bill. On the dales’ lower slopes, you have a bucolic idyll of billowy, pillowy green hills and neat stone farmhouses, like a child’s drawing of “The Country”, and currently flecked – as if the child then had an accident with the Tipp-Ex brush – with spots of white, where new lambs totter and sheep graze. On the higher ground, meanwhile, grass gives way to peat and heather and the rockier, rawer, more rugged handsomeness of the moors, all drama and desolation.
There’s a year’s worth of great walks, drives, cycles and even kayaks in the immediate area, but perhaps the most atmospheric is right here on the doorstep of the Field of Dreams. Taking the track from Richard and Louise’s farmhouse alongside chirruping Bank Dike stream, I follow the lane until it simply slides beneath the surface of Thruscross Reservoir – and on to the lost village of West End, drowned when the River Washburn was dammed in 1966.
When the waters are low, its grooves reappear, but there is something deliciously uncanny about the place anyway. When I was there last week, the stillness was so profound, the silence so absolute, that I had to chuck a pebble into the waters to hear its “splosh” and make sure I hadn’t been struck deaf.
The next couple of days I spend pottering around Nidderdale, a landscape so abundantly lovely that you can afford to wander it at random rather than make for specific beauty spots. Accordingly, I’m led entirely by my infantile attraction to places that sound like they might be insults – Blubberhouses, Cobby Syke, Kettlesing Bottom – and by my stomach. Nidderdale has been designated an Area of Outstanding Natural
Beauty, but after extensive research I’m happy to declare it an Area of Pretty Splendid Sausage Rolls, too. (Farm shops are plentiful around here; and for dessert there is Pateley Bridge, home to the world’s oldest sweet shop.)
Everything is eaten al fresco – in the bluebell-strewn lee of Fewston Church, for instance, where the flowers are as richly purple as the stained-glass windows – and in such peace that I can hear the curlews cry and watch the rabbits waffling their noses. (At one point, I’m even approached by a roe deer.)
It rains a bit, inevitably, and it turns out those dry stone walls aren’t all that dry when you’re looking for somewhere to sit and enjoy your quarter-pound of sherbet pips. But back at the Field of Dreams, each vehicle comes with its own horsebox, winningly converted into a bathroom with proper plumbedin shower. Between that, and the firepits, and the nice fluffy duvets, there’s none of the shivery damp that can ruin a night under even the poshest canvas at other glampsites.
Incongruous as the vehicles look here, it all somehow works – though it wasn’t an easy ride for Johnny and the team, and there is a particularly poignant, slightly tearful bump in the road in episode two of the show (“The first site we’d agreed on had fallen through. I’d just lost my mum, two years after my dad, so grief, and Covid, and being separated from my children, and I was starting to develop anxiety issues – I’d about had enough.”)
Now, though, he adds: “It’s the bus’s time to shine. I do want to keep Patricia all to myself in a way, but I also want to share her with the world. So she’s open for guests, except I’ve booked one week for me and my two sons; and I’ve blocked out a few days around my birthday, for my mates and me, because we all turned 50 in lockdown and couldn’t celebrate. But it will be gentle…”
It’s certainly not a rowdy campsite, and anyone expecting showbiz razzledazzle – or Johnny as their genial host – will be disappointed. “Some people seem to assume I’ll be living on site, and entertaining them like some kind of
Butlin’s redcoat,” he says, “but sadly not. I will be sociable when I’m up there, but for the other 48 weeks of the year I’ll have to get Louise and Richard a cardboard cut-out of me.”
The place certainly doesn’t need any bells, whistles or 2D representations of Mr Vegas, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t still got ideas for the site.
“There were things people will see in the telly show that we’ve had to take out because of Covid, or planning rules or whatever, but I’d like to try to make some of them happen: an outdoor cinema screen, maybe, or a ‘naked tepee’ [a giant wigwam frame, without the canvas] for socialising. Perhaps a communal barbecue or local food businesses doing pop-ups.”
And does he have the hospitality bug now? Will we see an empire of JVbranded restaurants, hotels, casinos and conference centres (Los Angeles-DubaiKettlesing Bottom)?
“Well, I do have the ‘If not now, when?’ bug. That’s kind of how all this started: I lost my father and hit that point of ‘If I don’t do the things I want to do in life now, maybe I never will.’ So next up, there’s potential for a very, very, very reasonably priced boat which I could moor off a beach in north-west England, miles from anywhere, as a sort of Hemingwayesque writers’ retreat. And then there’s the helicopter treehouses.”
He mentioned this idea – to buy some defunct choppers and suspend them among the treetops for overnight guests somewhere – in the TV show, and it was generally assumed he was at least half joking. But oh no. “There’s a lad been in touch, thinks he can get us a couple of helicopters. There may be a few health and safety checks, mind…”
‘It all started one drunken night when I went online and bought this knackered old bus’