‘Yes, I mean it’s pretty unarguable that my family peaked in the 1800s, it’s all been a bit downhill from there.’
Francis ‘F*****’ Fulford is standing on a large grand staircase in a chamber as cavernous as it is gloomy. Behind him, ornate wallpaper hangs down from the vintage fittings. Decades of dust cling to the chandelier.
Mr Fulford, 72, is the 26th Fulford to call Great Fulford home – the imposing Devon manor house and 3000 acre estate having been bequeathed to his family by Richard the Lionheart in 1199 for a ‘job well done’ in the crusades.
In 2004, he and his family lifted the curtain on their secretive and wildly ostentatious lives by inviting a Channel 4 camera crew in to film them as they battled to stay on top of their sprawling estate.
The program, titled ‘The F****** Fulfords’ due to their fetish for swearing, exposed them as endearingly rude and crude, dirty and skint, with compellingly politically incorrect, biased, bigoted and archaic views on life.
It made an instant star out of Francis, who says he was paid £40,000 for his work on the program, and he soon levied his new found fame to appear on several other naughties reality TV shows including How Clean Is Your House and Country House Rescue.
All the money from these appearances, he says, went directly back into the upkeep of the house and helped them stay afloat. But of course one day, he admits, ‘the phone stopped ringing.’
Now, over twenty years since they were immortalised on our TV screens, MailOnline sat down with Mr ‘F*****’ to find out how he and his family are navigating their roles as wardens of the house amid rising costs and controversial new Labour land policies.
Naturally, we also asked him whether he had decided which of his four children he would be giving the estate to, and perhaps predictably, we were told to ‘f*** off.’
Francis ‘F*****’ Fulford is standing on a large grand staircase in a chamber as cavernous as it is gloomy
In 2004, he and his family lifted the curtain on their secretive and wildly ostentatious lives by inviting a Channel 4 camera crew in to film them
The program, titled ‘The F****** Fulfords’ due to their fetish for swearing, exposed them as endearingly rude and crude, dirty and skint
Over twenty years since they were immortalised on our TV screens, MailOnline sat down with Mr ‘F*****’ to find out how he and his family are navigating their roles as wardens of the house
Like all great country houses of note, Great Fulford is all but hidden from view as we approach from Exeter, navigating the pot-holed farm lanes and dirt tracks owned and un-maintained by Francis.
When we do finally see it, the house is already upon us, its enormous size looming over us and dominating the manicured green hill on which it squats.
Francis is waiting for us outside with a walking stick in hand flanked by two pedigree dogs, one of which he insists is terminally lazy.
‘Did you get here OK?’, he asks genuinely, clearly not picking up on the fact we’re still a bit stunned by the sheer salubriousness of his digs, ‘tell you what, you really picked a bad time to get into journalism didn’t you! Bet the days of the long lunches are all gone!’
This we will soon learn is part and parcel of Francis’ affable character. He speaks first and thinks later, a trait that has won him admirers and got him into trouble more times than he can count.
Joining him today is his charming wife and Fulford matriarch Kishanda, 58, who busies herself in one of the house’s imposing chambers while Francis tests the waters with us.
To this day, Kishanda still has the impossible task of looking after the enormous house, while Francis devises ingenious and not-so-ingenious money-making schemes – but more of that later.
Like all great country houses of note, Great Fulford is all but hidden from view as we approach from Exeter
Inside the mansion, the Fulford’s faithful black labrador has pride of place on the table
Fulford matriarch Kishanda, 58, has always had the impossible task of following along with her husband’s schemes
The 3000 acre estate was bequeathed to the Fulford family by Richard the Lionheart in 1199 for a ‘job well done’ in the crusades
The mansion is grandiose on the inside but falling apart in places inside
‘I can’t believe it was twenty years ago’, Francis says, whilst reclining in an armchair overlooking his lake, ‘of course everything and nothing has changed in that time.
‘Of course we have a bunch of clowns in power at the moment who have rather wrecked my tax planning. But I suppose that’s life. It’s like one minute you’re driving down a smooth tarmac road but i’ll tell you, when you go around the corner there’s always a great big f****** pothole.
‘But generally, things have been good for us. The children have grown up and two of them are getting married in the house this year.’
The Fulford children – twins Matilda and Arthur, 30, Humphrey, 28, and Edmund, 25 – also appeared with their parents on our screens featuring in the 2014 BBC documentary Life Is Toff.
Oldest son, Francis Arthur Fulford, who TV fans came to know as Arthur, is technically the next in line to inherit the now crumbling 800-year-old home, however when asked ‘F*****’ himself was quick to shut us down.
‘I don’t know myself and obviously they’re not going to find out through the Daily f****** Mail’, he says.
Arthur’s youngest brother Edmund, a self-confessed ‘thickie’ who left school with no qualifications, said in 2014: ‘Arthur knows nothing about running the estate, so if Dad dies it’ll be a f***ing disaster.
Just over a decade ago, the little Fulfords were portrayed as a brood of unruly brats, spending their days scrapping and hurling cricket balls across the floor of the Great Hall, smashing china or slumping in front of the TV for hours – until their mother became so frustrated she hauled it into the lake.
When they returned in the 2014 series the boys were seen hitting golf balls across the lake, while Matilda roller skates around the Great Hall.
The family returned in the 2014 series Life Is Toff (LtR – Matilda Fulford, Arthur Fulford, Francis Fulford, Edmund Fulford, Humphrey Fulford)
Francis Fulford and his children Arthur, Matilda and Humphrey promoting their show on This Morning in 2014
Great larks certainly, but how are they today and is there any Succession style maneuvering to get their hands on the house?
Francis continues: ‘They’re all doing great. Matilda is doing extremely well and is married to a DJ who does that BOOM BOOM music. We all spent Covid together and it was a great laugh.
‘I felt sorry for those poor sods in the London sky rises though, still we need to listen to the f****** ‘experts’.
‘Edmond and Humphrey will be getting married this year to some really nice girls. They’re both holding their weddings here of course, I mean, it would be stupid not to.’
Naturally, the upkeep of the 50-room decaying Great Fulford stately home is a full time job for Francis and his wife, who have performed admirably ensuring it is fit for the next generation at least.
They’ve still had their detractors though he says.
‘It’s funny thing. You look up at the ceiling and you see the cracking paint peeling off a bit and some of the wallpaper and you think “Wow, they’ve let it go to rack and ruin”‘, Francis explains from his study.
‘But really, that doesn’t matter. No, what matters is the wiring, what matters is the roof. And you could spend a fortune on the rewiring or on the roof and then people come around say you’re sitting on your hands.
‘But if you bought a paint brush out and a pot of paint they’d think you were doing fantastic.
‘I’m horrified to hear that these modern windows are only guaranteed for 25 years! We’ve had these bloody windows for the last 200 and they’ll be good for the next 200 as well hopefully!’
Naturally, the upkeep of the 50-room decaying Great Fulford stately home is a full time job for Francis and his wife
Many of the walls in the Grade I listed manor house have seen better days
Doors and floorboards in the house show signs of scratches and wear and tear
Many of the walls are battered and bruised but still perfectly serviceable
The Fulfords have always freely admitted they are asset rich but cash poor living under a black cloud of maintenance obligations – with the estate alone costing £150,000 a year to run.
Of course, failure for Francis is not an option. He is the 23rd Francis Fulford to own the hall, and he says he will not be known as the shameful ancestor who surrendered it to the heinous National Trust.
‘They’re run by committees’, he says disdainfully, ‘they are incredibly extravagant, totally incompetent and wasteful. If it became a National Trust site I would have failed – I would have lost the battle, lost the war. No, I’ll never surrender.’
Francis was portrayed a laughing stock in 2004 after coming up with a string of harebrained schemes to try to secure the family fortune.
These included wandering the grounds with a metal detector in the hope of unearthing buried treasure.
He also famously provoked a storm as he guided a group of tourists and told them about one of his ancestors who commanded a fleet of ships against the French, killing 5,000 of them.
He described this historic event as ‘a satisfactory result all round’.
These days, despite the camera’s being gone, he’s still devising ingenious and not-so-ingenious money-making schemes to get some funds in the kitty.
He says: ‘I haven’t sold an acre for 40 years. I’m rather hoping I might keep that going, but you never know do you which is why I’m against planning.
‘I’ve tried everything and will try bloody everything. Laser tag? Water assault courses? Tough mudders? I’ll consider them all.
‘Years ago, we had Playboy shooting glamour scenes in the house. The British girls were great fun but the Americans were a bit anal.
‘Wellness is my new target, it is a vast boom area.
‘My wife has set up in the barn behind the house studio to do handmade pottery.
‘We converted the top of his barn into a studio where you can have up to eight students, and I think in the long run, something like residential courses.
‘Some of my friends in London were telling me they hold events in their home where they charge £150 a ticket. You couldn’t do that here of course as everyone who lives around Devon is poor.
‘That being said, the tide of wealth has crept down from London as far as Bruton so we could be quids in soon!’
Francis has always maintained he will never surrender his family estate to the National Trust
The Fulfords have always freely admitted they are asset rich but cash poor living under a black cloud of maintenance obligations
In a bid to rustle up some money, Francis has created a new residential pottery studio in his barn
He hopes that the pottery stays will be lucrative when they are launched
Francis’ exploits on TV catapulted him to national fame.
Memorable gaffs include trying to conjure up a house ghost to attract American tourists for haunted-house-themed dinner parties, and searching his grounds for telephone cables so he could invoice BT for using his land.
Meanwhile, Kishanda, after cleaning bat droppings from the furniture, would dash off to place money on the 2.30 at Wincanton.
Looking back on his TV career, does he have any regrets?
‘It’s all in the edit’, he reveals, ‘when we were doing that particular program (F****** Fulfords), they planned for it to go out before the watershed so were very relaxed about mine and my wife’s language and the children’s language as they were going to edit it out.
They put it into something they ‘the f*** box’ and one of the producers thought it was great fun and hence the program was born.
‘Of course, when you do TV, you got to remember, they want to make good TV.
‘They’re not interested in having a sanitized version of you shown. On the whole television, it doesn’t lie, but it does caricature.
‘But we made money from it and I don’t regret most of my TV work except for Country House Rescue. The presenter was a complete arse.’
So what next for the Fulford clan as ‘F*****’ himself contemplates handing over the keys to the next generation?
Candidly, Francis reveals: ‘The only way I look forward to growing old is by planting trees. When you plant a tree in twenty years time you’ll see it become a tree. That’s a great thing to look forward to when I’m in my nineties.’
And what of the thorny issue of inheritance? Will he be drawn into revealing who the ‘unlucky’ heir will be?
‘They’re all lucky’, he corrects, ‘No, the key thing here will be, when they start having children, I will f*** off, because this is a place you need children in. They love that they were brought up here and they don’t have any fear or worries about it.
‘They could all do it.’
