The Celeb 4 Life

The quiet Cotswold village of Tirley (pop 450) boasts neither school nor shop, but the community spirit is fostered by a thriving village hall (circa 1934).

When the hall committee was awarded a borough council grant to buy some transport, the Tirley Community Minibus Association was duly formed and the £30,000 bought a 150bhp turbodiesel Volkswagen LT45, seating 16.


An enticing programme of day trips was drawn up and distributed among the mainly retired membership - Cheddar Gorge, Clark's Shopping Village, Clearwell Caves - all profit from the £8-a-head tickets going towards the vehicle's running costs and the maintenance of the fabric of the village hall (which is badly in need of new lavatories).

Bookings were steady but unspectacular. It began to look as though the committee had overestimated the Tirley pensioner community. Then Derrick Swan, 70, a retired assistant college principal, and village hall committee member, had an idea.

With so many famous people, both alive and dead, with local connections, why not organise an historical and cultural tour of the wealthy Cheltenham, Stroud, Cirencester triangle with historical commentary and quiz?

He and Brian Pegler, a local historian, worked out a route, devised the quiz, scheduled the trip and added it to the programme. "Hollywood comes to the Cotswolds" they called it.

The response was encouraging. A local paper ran a piece about the tour, rechristening it the "Jillywood" tour because Jilly Cooper's home village of Bisley is on the itinerary questionnaire (Tour Quiz, Question 5. (1937-) Well-known journalist, writer and media superstar. Author of many No. 1 bestsellers, including Riders, Rivals, Polo. Lives at Bisley.) A crowd of ladies from Cheltenham ensured a full minibus for the forthcoming first outing in June.

The enterprise was picked up by other newspapers, and tastefully embellished by yet more, until it reached the stage last week, when you couldn't open a newspaper without forming a mental picture of double-decker, luxury coaches packed with -rubber-necking tourists, barreling down the narrow Cotswold lanes or stationed outside the gates of Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet's £3.5 million 14th-century manor near Stow-on-the Wold.

"We've been astounded by the fuss," says Mr Swan, standing in his kitchen. Over his right shoulder, in the far distance, I can see Bredon Hill, subject of AE Houseman's beautiful poem in A Shropshire Lad, and am transfixed by it. Mr Swan is a tall, polite, kindly man, but clearly struggling to come to terms with his unexpected celebrity.

"But it's got entirely out of proportion," he says. "We've got two minibuses booked for our Jillywood tour in June. That's all. But I could fill half a dozen with all the journalists and media people that have rung up about it." The telephone rings for the third time in five minutes and he visibly sags in despair. Even his Pyrenean mountain dog seems jittery.

Had he considered that he is himself now eligible for star billing on the Jillywood tour itinerary? (Question 1. (1936-) Name this Tirley Community Minibus Committee Member and Tirley's most famous resident. In latter years, mentally unstable. Complained continually of hearing ringing telephones. Drowned himself in village hall's new lavatories in 2006.)

Oh, he had indeed, he says, shaking his head in wonderment. We finish our coffee and with the sound of his telephone accompanying us to the front door, he hands me a Jillywood quiz paper and takes me out on my own -private tour preview.

As we motor through the dripping Cotswold countryside, I scan the quiz. Of the 24 locations listed, 10 are connected with famous people who are dead (including the poets Laurie Lee and Ivor Gurney, "Bomber" Harris, Sir Ralph Richardson and Nelly Shaw, the founder member of a local nudist colony based on Tolstoyan principles), three more are the homes of members of the Royal family (Charles, Anne, and Prince Michael of Kent), but only two - Liz Hurley's £2.7 million, eight-bedroom farmhouse and 72-acre estate just outside the village of Barnsley, and perhaps Jilly Cooper's chantry at Bisley - could incontrovertibly be said to have any connection with Hollywood.

And the tour not only doesn't stop at these places (the only stops are of the "comfort "variety) it doesn't even go past them.

Not that there's much to see at either place anyhow. We make a detour and stop outside the unpretentious wooden gates to Liz Hurley's house ("Private. Keep Out", says a sign in big red capitals) but the road leading up to the house disappears over one hill, reappears on a more distant one and finally disappears into woods on the distant horizon.

There's not even a gleam of a tiled roof among the trees. Then, feeling uncomfortably like a couple of voyeurs, we drive down to have a look at Jilly Cooper's house at Bisley.

The streets of Bisley are narrow in the extreme, far too narrow for anything like a minibus. Even if Jillytour punters wanted to get out and goggle at the house's exterior for a while, they would have to walk.

To Mr Swan's acute embarrassment, I walk across the gravel and bang on Jilly Cooper's front door, hoping that the author might enjoy hearing that she's mentioned in a Tirley Community Minibus Association tour quiz. But a very nice lady who isn't Jilly Cooper very politely says that Jilly is hard at work on a newspaper article and can't be disturbed.

Of course, there are so many celebrities living in the Cotswolds that if you threw a rolled up copy of Hello! up any of the village high streets, you'd probably hit one. There's Kate (Winslet) and husband Sam, and there's Hugh and Damian and Kate (Moss).

But celebrity is so cheap today, that the entire British countryside, from Cornwall to Cumbria, is positively throbbing with them. Call me old-fashioned, but one bona fide Hollywood star out of 24 Cotswold personalities on the tour, many of them brown bread, hardly warrants the title Jillywood and a media scrum, if you ask me.

We get back into the car. Whether graced by celebrities or not, the countryside in between these locations is intensely pretty, even on a soggy day at the end of a long winter. The ochre dry-stone walls are as satisfying to look on as completed jig-saw puzzles. And, though recently cut by mechanical flails, the wild blackthorn and hawthorn hedges bordering the road are as square and neat as topiary.

A six-hour tour of such attractive country ending at a pub is worth £8 of anybody's money. I sit back and enjoy. Sod the celebrities, I say.