The Midsomer Norton Community Cinema has announced this week that it will be providing an opportunity to see Till the Boys Come Home, the Royal Television Society's award-winning drama-documentary featuring veteran, Harry Patch, and the actors who brought to life the lives of local people during WWI as part of the local play, No Thankful Village. The play was inspired by Chilcompton author, Chris Howell's book of the same name.
Three screenings of Till the Boys Come Home are being arranged on Friday, 29th and Saturday, 30th August, at 7.30 p.m. and on Sunday, 31st August, at 5 p.m., in the Town Hall Assembly Room, Midsomer Norton.
Over 1,000 people came to the original performances of No Thankful Village in December 2003. Thankfully, it was filmed at the time as part of Till the Boys Come Home, giving local people the opportunity to see it again today. The only other time the recording has been shown is at the Watershed, in Bristol, in May, as part of the Festival of Ideas.
It was in the 1980s that Chris Howell began interviewing men and women who had lived through the awful period of the Great War – which then produced the content for his book. The eventual cast of the play, produced at Somervale School, numbered eighty cast and forty behind the scenes and was largely made up of local people. The script of the play was written by Colin Thomas and the filmed episodes were produced by Lee Cox, whose company have provided the recordings for screening. Both the play and the documentary came about after Chris Howell gave a talk on the First World War at Radstock Museum – unknown to him, there was a Chief Executive of a television company in the audience.
At the end of the Great War, there were thirty so-called 'Thankful Villages' in the whole of Great Britain – villages to which all the young men who went to war returned alive (though many came back with scarred bodies, horrific injuries, or stunned minds). Remarkably, a quarter of those villages were in Somerset, but amongst the two dozen or so communities around Midsomer Norton, there was no thankful village.
"I'm so chuffed that the Community Cinema is going ahead with these screenings – particularly as it's about Midsomer Norton people and has such meaning for our community as we reflect on the 100th anniversary," said Chris Howell.
The play is a small tribute from the members of the community in 2003 to their forebears who experienced such horrors and those 330 men commemorated on the memorials within three miles of Midsomer Norton.
For further information and tickets, please visit http://www.midsomernorton">www.midsomernorton communitytrust.co.uk or ring: 01761 419133. Due to the strong demand expected for the limited places, tickets will be on sale in advance, with any remaining on sale on the door on the night.