This film had been on my "would like to see" list since it came out and as I read more about it, the more I wanted to see it for myself. But like so many titles on that list, it seemed to come and go in no time at all and I never made it. I resigned to waiting for it to appear on TV sometime.
But then, a flyer came with the parish magazine and a few little notices appeared around the village. We were to have our own "Flicks in the Sticks" in the Church Rooms and guess what was to be the very first offering? Together with a couple of friends, we hot footed it down to "The Screen on the Hill" tonight and sat with tubs of homemade icecream in the company of another hundred or so of our neighbours - it was a full house.
The programme began with some local advertising; the village butcher, the local garage and the electrician all featuring in some entertaining (and well made) promotional videos, linked together with the delivery service from the general stores down in the valley. There followed a short feature length film of a couple of local residents before the main film began.
For almost two hours, you could have heard a pin drop as the whole audience watched in complete silence - not a murmur. What a terrific film too! We loved the costumes, the lovely characters; dear Toots and sweet Sam, not to mention the irritating Mr Brown. As for Fanny and Mr John Keats himself, well...in the words of the New York Times, "Perfectly chaste and insanely sexy". Indeed.
The next offering from The Screen on the Hill is "Julie and Julia" and though we've seen it already, we'd have been there were it not for the fact that we have plans for that evening already. We look forward to many more of these civilised evenings now that the moving pictures have arrived in our village!
