Viva Lewes Issue #146 November 2018

ON THIS MONTH: TV
Seaside Town
Bringing some magic home
“It’s been brilliant!” Warren Dudley tells me.
“The community has made this TV show.” He’s
talking about Seaside Town, a new mini-series
written and directed by him, in conjunction with
the Newhaven Regeneration Group (NRG),
which airs from the 18th on Amazon Prime.
This project was, in part, inspired by Warren’s
recent experience screen-writing The
Bromley Boys – a feel-good feature film that was
wonderfully received earlier this year, and boasts
an IMDb score of 7.8. “People have really,
really liked it”, he says. “We had a star-studded
Wembley Stadium premiere that was fabulous.
And the film was loved in Bromley and the surrounding
Kent. It’s always fun, seeing your town
on screen – people like picking up on the local
references – and the shopping centre was decked
out in the football colours specially. It was a
lovely, lovely atmosphere.”
So, what led from this to the Newhaven project?
“I wanted to bring some of the same magic to my
own, old hometown”, says Warren. Seaside Town,
the idea, was born from a chat with NRG’s Mark
Beaumont. “We were talking about what we’d
each been up to in our work, and
hatched this plan to do something
here, together.”
Unlike The Bromley Boys, it’s not
a feature film – it’s a series of six
ten-minute episodes – “but
it is, again, all about football!”
Warren imagines
most people will end
up watching them in
one clump, over an
hour or so. Although
the episode length was
dictated by budget, he says
it’s been a really fun format
to work with. “Feature films are quite hard to
write. You have that middle forty minutes that sag
if you’re not careful. Not so here.”
The series features two professional actors
– Roger O’Hara and Hannaj Bang-Bendz (pictured)
– while the rest of the cast is drawn from
Newhaven. “We put out shouts on Facebook for
people to send in film auditions. We got a great
response – 170 tapes – and cast from there. So it’s
an eighty per cent Newhaven-made product.”
Warren also had fun. “I had complete creative
freedom, which was lovely. I was just trusted –
to do, well, everything really, charging round
Newhaven with my little crew. And the locations
are beautiful: the old port is lovely, the views, the
sea… Though the weather could be a bit hit and
miss at times: it was so changeable, we had a few
continuity issues!”
Warren grew up in Newhaven, and attended
Tideway School. Today “I’ve moved all the way
away to Seaford”. But not much has changed
since his childhood days. “There’s a lot of
development down by the river, but mostly it’s
just the same. These places don’t
really change”, he says. “And
we weren’t aiming to present
a grungy old Newhaven –
though the joke is there,
when an American soccer
star gets sent to
Newhaven FC – but
we wanted to show
the area’s beauty. And
it wasn’t hard: it really
is beautiful, round
here.” Charlotte Gann
Seaside Town is also
available on DVD.
seasidetown.tv
49