Dick & Angel Strawbridge Tease Christmas Special Of Escape To The Chateau: ‘We Will Return With Series 10 In The UK This Year’
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And on passing down a legacy to their children
The Strawbridge family – Dick, Angel, Arthur and Dorothy – made their fame through Escape to the Chateau on Channel 4. After a supposed final series in 2022, the TV show is making an unexpected return to the UK later this year for series 10, with, Angel teases, a Christmas special in the works. Dick and Angel Strawbridge speak to C&TH about the new series, and on passing down a legacy to their children.
Q&A: Dick & Angel Strawbridge On Escape to the Chateau Series 10
How are you?
Dick: Busy. We’re in event season, and I’m around the house doing bits and pieces – Angel’s been in the kitchen a lot today – but it’s nice to have a slice in the day to come and speak to you.
I hear you’re coming over to the UK soon, for the annual Game Fair?
Angel: Yes, we do the Game Fair. We’re excited about going there again – it’s a lovely event.
Dick: That’s been one of my big successes: I’ve been going to the Game Fair for the last 40 years, and yet married an Essex girl – who was not a country girl. And now I’ve gotten Angel, and Arthur and Dorothy, to come along. It’s an amazing day just to enjoy the countryside. It’s something I can’t imagine not doing.
Does it make you nostalgic for the English countryside, or are you very much: nope, we love being in France?
Dick: We live in the department of Mayenne, and have a rolling countryside that is quite British – it’s just below Normandy, so there are a lot of similarities. But we love that it’s so quiet here – rural France is so spread out.
Angel: We genuinely love the British countryside – whether it’s Scotland, or a sundown in Cornwall, or any of the bits in between. And we’re hugely connected to the UK still. I feel like we’ve got the best of both worlds: we get to travel. We were just home this weekend to see our nieces.
Are you calling from the chateau?
Dick: Absolutely. There’s a lot happening around us right now – we’ve got a project in the walled garden, and we’re hosting a wedding next week.
Angel: The room we’re calling from is Dick’s office, which is beautiful in a very Strawbridge way. Mismatched bits of wallpaper and pieces Dick has collected over the years. And the reason we’re in here: it’s got the best Wi-Fi.
Talk to me, actually, about the internet. I read in another interview that you’re trying to keep at least social media use fairly low in your family.
Dick: We’re quite protective of our privacy at home, especially with children, but I’d actually say we’re very open to it because as a family we have fun left, right and centre.
Angel: Yeah, I mean, having shared our lives publicly for a decade – many people watched our children grow up – we’re proud to share our highlights. Sometimes we’re low on social media just because life gets too busy, though.
Do the kids have phones or social media?
Dick: At school, they’re not allowed to use phones. I’ll say that, when you’re mum and dad trying to find the kids, phones are a godsend, compared to the old days. We’re trying to find a balance, really. It’s especially difficult living in the countryside, as people need to communicate, get together, visit friends; it’s important that they are not isolated. They’re under parental supervision though.
Angel: They don’t have social media accounts yet – they’re 12 and 13 and a lot of their friends don’t either. My view: they’ve got many years ahead to make the decision about how to use social media themselves.
12 and 13 – they’re growing up. I know this plays a big part in Series 10. Tell me more about what we’ll see.
Angel: Big changes. In 2022, we had our big closing party because the kids were coming of an age where they were changing so much. Dorothy had had a camera around her since she was zero, and part of the beauty of the show was that the kids didn’t even really know – there was a real innocence to it. We felt it was really important for the family to have time out and just be busy doing what we moved here for.
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And then a big change started to happen, which led us to think: we should capture this. Dorothy decided she wanted her own room, because Arthur and Dorothy had shared a room their whole lives, as it worked logistically in the house. So she moved into our room, Arthur got his own room, and we moved into the honeymoon suite. The new series is beautiful because the kids are a lot taller, a lot more grown up, and the whole season is about change.
Dick: Arthur’s the tallest in the family now. They’ve been through all the body changes, the voice changes – they’ve had some quiet time, some privacy. Now they’ve got their own rooms. And the honeymoon suite this week is just part of the evolution of our family. When Dorothy made that call, it was easy. We knew it was time. And what we’ve done is made the new honeymoon suite even more special – it’s Honeymoon Suite mark two.
Is there a release date yet?
Angel: No, but we will return to UK screens this year. What we do have is a Christmas Special attached to it – we finished filming around Christmas and it felt rude not to do one. So the series may sit until later in the year to tie in with the Christmas Special.
Ooh. Love a Christmas special tease.
Angel: It’s filmed by the same team and with the same post-production house as Escape to the Chateau. Tracy-Ann Oberman is back as narrator. It’s renovation, it’s crafting, as per, but I think the biggest difference, which we’re excited for people to see, is that the children are more involved and more useful than ever. They’re doing big projects now, as opposed to playing alongside them.
When thinking about their own rooms, were there any crazy requests? Did anything surprise you?
Dick: Dorothy doing a mood board wasn’t a surprise, exactly, although the fact it was so stunning was. Dorothy is a hard customer because she knows exactly what she wants. She literally made the bed herself, exactly how she wanted it. Arthur and I were in the workshop building things for his room as well. At 12 and 13 they’ve got a real sense of who they are.
Do you think that comes from you both, or is it also French schooling, or are they just natural forces of nature?
Angel: It’s the people they are, I think. This is one of the things we feel really proud of with the children. They really love finding things and giving them a go. That’s why I fell in love with this life, why we love each other. Just thinking: what could go wrong? Having confidence. They’re fearless. Dorothy was getting really stuck in, Arthur exactly the same, although he’s that little bit bigger and taller. I think it’s probably that they know nothing else.
Dick: Their biggest success story is themselves. They know that if they can picture it, they can do it. They’re very different – Arthur’s not like Dorothy, Dorothy’s not like Arthur, and they’re not actually like us either. They’re their own characters. That was part of why we stopped going back to filming when we did. They had to have a chance to not worry about what anyone thought, just to have a couple of years to get on with it. And they did. They’re in a very diverse French school in a city about 20 minutes from us, and quite honestly, they’re thriving. That’s what we were hoping for.
That’s really lovely to hear. It sounds like they’ve learned a lot from seeing you both take a risk by taking on the chateau. At what point did it stop feeling like a risk?
Dick: There was no risk for us, really. We had lots of plans for what we could do within the chateau, and we knew that anything that was a problem could be fixed. The chateau was built 150 years ago by a bunch of people without any power tools – none at all – and they managed to make it. So when it comes to doing anything to the fabric of the place now, in the 2020s with all the tools we have, we shouldn’t be worried. We have this saying: we can do anything, we just can’t do everything, because there’s so much going on.
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Angel: And if something doesn’t quite go right, that’s never failure. You just change your path a little bit. That’s been Dick and I our whole lives. You just work it out, find a solution.
Talk to me about future-proofing the chateau – sustainability, longer-term plans.
Angel: There are two different elements. There’s future-proofing practically, i.e. getting the roof done, and so on. I’ll hand over to my husband on sustainability, because he’s been Mr Sustainability for many decades. When we first started, I worked a lot away from home to bring in the money to get the basics done, set up the business. Then, as the wedding business and events business took off, the income could be generated from within the chateau, which allowed us to grow. But we haven’t done all the sustainability projects we want to do yet.
Dick: When it comes to fixing the chateau for the long term, we didn’t want Arthur and Dorothy to face massive bills downstream. There’s no way you want to hand your children a chalice that is anything other than framed and lovely. If we handed it over and it needed a new roof, that’s enough to scupper someone’s enthusiasm for a place. So we aim to get as much done as we possibly can to make it easier for them, however they choose to take it forward.
Angel: In terms of how we live, we don’t really throw anything away – everything is reused. I’ve got a huge love of vintage, which in itself is very sustainable. The children now love vintage, they don’t throw things away. And Dick, with his Not Easy Being Green BBC shows, was probably one of the first people to put in solar panels. We’ve got so many sustainable things around the house – we spend more on insulation than cosmetics to make the property work as well as it possibly can.
Dick: We’re just not banging a big green drum about it. People look and see how we’re living seasonally – trying to insulate properly, thinking about how we do things, local food – and all of the ethos here means we have a good life. You watch the programme and it’s: time to make some jam, something’s in season, do something with it. It brings your focus into living in the now.
That sounds like a very connected way to live with nature. On nature – how have you found this recent heatwave? Did it hit you as badly as London?
Angel: Oh yes. We went from handing out blankets at an event because it was so chilly, to 35 degrees.
Dick: But the chateau was built for it. The thick walls keep it cool in the summer and retain warmth in the winter. It’s only when you go outside that you feel the difference. The one thing we do have to manage in variable heat scenarios is heating – we use underfloor heating just in the areas we’re walking around, so we’re not heating empty rooms.
And what comes next? Is Series 11 on the cards?
Dick: Every year, we decide what to do next, and for the last five or six years we’ve included the children in that conversation. Series 10 existed because there was such big change within the family – Arthur is a young man now, Dorothy’s a young woman. But those changes haven’t quite finished, so we made the decision that Series 11 would follow from 10, because there are more things we’ve started in 10 that still need to be completed. Next year we’ll make the decision about what follows. What we always make sure of is that we protect the family time. We’ve really got a certain number of years to enjoy the children in the way we do now, and that’s our number one priority.
Angel: That’s another reason we’re excited to get to the Game Fair – we’ll be cooking together on the BASC stage.
Dick: It’s pretty much British country life gathered in one place. I’ve been a fly fisherman for 55 years, and I’m looking forward to having the chance to share that with Arthur [at the Game Fair’s Fishing Village] this year. It’s all about the stewardship of the countryside. We talk about being custodians of the chateau – we’re only holding it for a period, looking after it for whoever comes next. That’s what the countryside is too, and the Game Fair celebrates that. It’s a really important family day for us.
The Strawbridge family will host the VIP Enclosure at the Game Fair 2026. Tickets available via thegamefair.org.
