The research team working behind the scenes to prepare for the launch of the Pevensey Timeline, the online resource for schools across the country, that will tell the story of the village and its rich 2,000 year history have made an extraordinary discovery, a lost ‘Pevensey Bay’ train station, that does not appear anywhere on a timetable in the history of the railways.
‘Fessing up’ one of the team told Bay Life today (Friday September 6) that the discovery was something of ‘a comedy moment’, more akin to an April Fool than a ground breaking piece of historical research likely to result in Ian Hislop and a film crew booking into the Bay Hotel to document a Christmas Special for BBC2.
Train spotter Bluebottle waiting patiently for a train to come through the Pevensey Bay railway station.
The researchers have uncovered a script for a show called ‘the Telegoons’, which was a short-lived Michael Bentine ‘version’ of the famous Radio Goon Show, transferred to television in the early nineteen sixties and written especially for children.
Sadly something in the morph to TV was lost and the show went the way of many other early BBC comedy pilots and into the potting shed.
Nonetheless, what is something of a rare treat, is that a few stills from a script of one of the shows have turned up. They do indeed give a set of visual references to a ‘Pevensey Bay Station’, as opposed to ‘The Pevensey Bay Halt’ that you see in train timetables and on photographs.
Afficionadoes of the Goon Show will know that references to Pevensey Bay did on occasion slip into the scripts of the iconic fifties radio show, linked to that fact that both Spike Milligan, the lead writer of the the show and Peter Sellers, were both regular visitors to the locality over a number of summers from the fifties to the early sixties, staying in a chalet on the beach in Norman’s Bay.
One episode of the Show is even referentially titled ‘The Pevensey Bay Disaster’.
Much of this information is known and documented. What has been unknown until now, the team believe, is that a visual record of legendary comic ‘Pevensey Bay Station’ also exists.
Authors of the timeline hope to be able to include the only known visual references to a ‘Pevensey Bay Station’ ever shown on the BBC as part of the history of the area in the strand of the online tableaux that will display a local ’20th century comedy timeline’.
This element of the work will include not just Spike Miligan and Peter Sellers but also Jo Brand and Eddie Izzard, both of whom have well documented public links with the ‘hidden jewel in the Crown of Sussex’.
IMAGE CREDIT: INSIDE PEVENSEY BAY STATION: VIOLET PHILLPOTT
IMAGE CREDIT: TRAINSPOTTER BLUEBOTTLE: RICHARD WHEELER
