Freddie-the-Beeb boxes clever with founding cast of Cressroads
Blogstones for milestones, Blogsbody’s Continuing Story of Cressroads, a microcosm of small town UK at the start of the 21st century - although more than a handful of its haves as well as have-nots would argue otherwise - has posted a trail of 40 blogs to mark out the territory for its developing cast of 500 with a claim to a place in a series of BBC films featuring British eccentricity.
They are the inhabitants of the watercress capital of the world, a Georgian market town called Alresford, population 5,000 and attracting twice its number to their annual May festival celebrating what remains of the crop, after scores of swans munch through hundreds of thousands of squids worth of their green, green cress of home at every start to every year.
Exotic dead meat, but for the birds’ royal entitlement to protection from the likes of catapults and firearms (see 23/04/09: Ma’am, it’s about your friggin’ swans), after word of another tale of the town’s watercress beds spills out of the blog to make national news. Click here to see the report.
All credit to the blog’s adopted TV producer Freddie Rostand, who explains: “I make it my business to seek out people who are interesting or unusual; ideally both.”
Enter Ruby Rangoon, the blog’s agony aunt, moonlighting between managing Avington’s Pinder Centre, a registered charity supporting over 100 patients weekly with hydrotherapy, physiotherapy and aromatherapy treatments.
Alias Ruby, Kim gives way to Gazza-the-Garden, wheeling his lawnmower down Alresford’s fashionable Broad Street.
Next, Freddie introduces Kay-the-Kamera, official photographer to the blog. And a word from Kay - “impenetrable” - is followed by a lip-biting “no” from her sartorial hubby Simon, whose Prizebyte hosts Blogsbody’s make-what-you-can-of-it Continuing Story of Cressroads.
Before it is left to retired stockman turned newshound Henry Dogsbloggy to wish for a Page 3 to showcase some of his “old cows”.
After Cressroads’ founding cast of half-a-dozen humans is sandwiched end-to-end into Freddie’s three-minute film taking a day to shoot and almost as long to edit.
His closing frames dub the Arms at Tichborne – a medieval tavern steeped in the incredible story of a 21-stone Australian butcher, who conned the aristocratic Tichborne family into believing he was their long-lost heir and sparked the greatest fraud case of all time - as ‘Blog Central’.
Located on the Tichborne estate where, four dwindling generations later, everything is kept strictly above bar for erection fever in a village without a hall, school or public building to call its polling station.
Again, in the countdown to Tichborne casting its votes for seats coming up for grabs in the Fourth-of-June European Parliament as well as UK County Council elections, the Arms is called on to double as the neighbourhood polling station.
As it has for the past two decades. And where, just days ago, UKIP candidate Brian Clark, nearby Ovington church warden and retired man from the Pru’, elected successfully to down a pint of its real ale in search of a Tichborne proposer for his nomination papers.
“Sign here,” he held out his pen. As only an insurance salesman knows how. First to one of Ma Primmer’s sons. Then, a second. And, hours later, a third.
Newsflash! Sponsorship of Blogsbody’s forthcoming coverage of erection fever in Cressroads is via Gra - in Gaelic, ‘ghra’ means love – and the aforementioned team of five-plus-one gives thanks to witty William of Winchester for dropping the thought of it into Blogsbody’s suggestion box for sponsors at the bar of the Arms.
