Hawkstone Farmers Choir Wins Semi-Final, Reaches Final on May 30 Farmers Choir Bgt

The farmers choir bgt story changed on Saturday, May 30, when the Hawkstone Farmers Choir won its semi-final and booked a place in the final. The 34-strong group of British agricultural workers now has a shot at the £250,000 prize, with a national TV audience carrying its message into the last round.

Ben Brooke in West Bilney

Ben Brooke, a fourth-generation Norfolk farmer from West Bilney, said the group wants to raise awareness around mental health and loneliness in farming. He works on his family's 2,500-acre arable business, DH Deptford Farms, near March in Cambridgeshire, and described farming as a lonely profession: "It can be a super isolating profession - you are in your tractor all day, every day, and some people are not lucky enough to work with other people."

Brooke also said, "I think you will see something that is from our hearts" and explained, "We are trying to raise awareness around mental health, promoting how lonely farming can be." For a choir built from real agricultural workers, that turns a talent-show run into a public case for a problem the industry often keeps private.

One Day Like This and Pompeii

The group first formed as part of an advertising campaign for Jeremy Clarkson's Cotswolds-based brewing firm, then moved from promotion into competition television. Its audition performance of Elbow's One Day Like This won the golden buzzer from Amanda Holden, pushing the act forward before it sang Bastille's Pompeii in the semi-final.

Brooke said, "I've never been in a school choir, I've never sung by myself." He added, "I started because my daughter is really into singing and she loves dancing, so obviously you have got to practice what you preach, so I started singing in front of her." That gives the semi-final run a sharper edge: this is not a polished pop act assembled from the usual London circuit, but a group of farmers learning to sing in public while carrying a campaign message.

Sonny Green and £250,000

The choir now enters the final as second favourite behind spoken word poet Sonny Green, with the contest offering a £250,000 grand prize. If Hawkstone Farmers Choir wins, it plans to donate a major portion of that money to agricultural mental health charities, which would move the message from a prime-time platform into direct funding.

That is the real business of this run. The final placement gives the choir another national slot to keep mental health and suicide prevention in farming in the frame, and if it falls short, the exposure alone has already taken that case far beyond the fields of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.