INSIDE the honey-coloured stone walls of a Wiltshire vicarage, domestic chaos surges around the Rev Jamie Allen as he wolfs down a bowl of lukewarm tomato soup.

It is teatime. His wife Suzy is resorting to blackmail with their three-year-old daughter (“Carrie, there’ll be no dessert until you’ve eaten these carrots”), their six-year-old, Danielle, is bashing piano keys gustily and Katie, one, sits in her highchair while Allen feeds her segments of orange. A dog (Zebedee) pursues a cat (Foo). Carrie, munching a slice of pear, shows me a picture of Daddy’s horse, Ben, and Danielle’s pony, Bonnie.

The phone rings — the first of many calls. “The phone’s always hot,” says Allen. “It’s part of the job.”

That job is about to make 32-year-old Allen famous. A BBC documentary crew has been following him through his first year as rector of an affluent country parish (he asks not to say where, fearing stalkers). How will the villagers take to his new ways of thinking and his opposition to hunting? Will Suzy, 31, who admits to disliking housework and wears jeans appliquéed with diamanté to church, fall foul of the village gossips? And how, during nine months of service, will Jamie be brought so low that he considers giving it all up?

And how did they get here? At first, the Allens’ was a familiar enough story of boy meets girl. They were friends at school, fell in love, got engaged, went to university, got married. Unhappy about social breakdown in England, they planned a move to France where Allen would work as a computer programmer and they would start a family in a culture “where families sat together at mealtimes.” Tea chests were packed. Their pets had rabies injections.

Two weeks before they were due to leave, they went to a Eucharist service at a Coventry church. For Allen it was a life-changing experience. He received communion and returned to his pew. “Suddenly, I just really had the most mind-blowing awareness of — how can I describe it? It was like having arms wrapped around you, folded safe and lovely and secure and warm. It was very clear, very real, an incredible, tangible sensation of God being there.”

He registers my sceptical expression and shakes his head: “I’m not given to fanciful experiences at all. I’m a very pragmatic person most of the time but in that moment, it was suddenly extremely clear. I knew I had to be a vicar.”

Now hold on; a moment of spiritual revelation is one thing, but with such specific career advice attached? “Yes, it was a 360-degree turn. This was my road to Damascus. That was what I had to do.”

So he began five years of theological training, followed by a three-year curacy in Nuneaton, Staffordshire, where he learned to listen, to share in grief and joy and to tackle “the cure of people’s souls”. A big responsibility, he admits, not to say impossible. “You feel inadequate.”

But my goodness, the faithful adore him: at his final service in Nuneaton, the women in his former congregation wept and wailed with all the fervour of teenage pop fans. Wouldn’t this charisma, this ability to attract a young congregation, have been rather more useful in a deprived urban parish than in this affluent rural backwater? No, he says, he applied to be vicar here because he felt “a divine calling” when he stepped out of the car.

Nothing to do with wanting to bring up his young family somewhere nice, then? Allen regards me sternly. “If I believe I have God’s work in this parish, which obviously I do, then I have to believe that there is a divine scheme in mind.” He sighs. “But I have a responsibility as a dad as well. I think one could get blown away by the noble urge to go to a really tough place to the neglect of your family.”

But Allen’s move to the country has not been a sinecure; there have been significant fallouts with his congregation which have led him to question his calling.

“Unfortunately the harvest service I planned clashed with the Countryside Alliance march,” he says, rolling his eyes. “A brilliant example of a townie coming to rural England.” But this is disingenuous, surely. I have heard he doesn’t support hunting and refused, two weeks ago, to bless the local hunt. He is discomfited.