Frinton-on-Sea is a town that doesn’t like change. The shops haven’t changed for years and the seafront hasn’t changed for decades. The lives of the people who live there have become as beached in their own still histories as everything around them.
So when Network Rail announces it would like to automate the town’s manually operated level-crossing gates, the response in Frinton is a call to arms – a chance to defend the strange world they inhabit from the cruel onslaught of the 21st century.
As the town frets and agitates itself into an unlikely campaign to save its gates, film-maker Marc Isaacs, in the final film in the acclaimed first series of Wonderland, starts to unravel the eccentric and curious lives of the people who have decided to grow old in England’s most conservative seaside resort.
Wednesday 12 March
9.50-10.30pm BBC TWO
7 Comments »
Is the town only populated by bitter old people? I felt sorry for those who felt trapped, such a beautiful place with so much sadness…
Frinton is a beautiful town full of happy people - young and old! I grew up in Frinton and most of my family still live there. I’m 26 and i love the place. The film makers took advantage of a few vulnerable older people in the town and depicted Frinton in a very different light than reality. The BBC should be ashamed of themselves.
Disgraceful, yet curiously compelling. I spent a gloriously innocent childhood visiting Frinton every summer from 1958 - 1964. I can still smell the smell of the shop that sold everything from toys to buckets and spades, and the wooden floor in the Woolworths. It was a nasty spirited documentary. Did they win their battle about the gates? I hope so. These people didn’t deserve such cynical treatment and neither does the place.
I have only been to Frinton on a couple of occasions. I feel that the programme was insidiously cruel. I enjoyed watching it but only on reflection did I feel guilty in taking pleasure in the exploitation of elderly and vulnerable people. It poported to tell the story of the action group to save the level-crossing gates but that was a cover for another story altogether. The BBC should be ashamed of allowing the programme to be transmitted. And it was at cost to the viewer.
I don’t care what Frinton’s really like. All I know is I haven’t laughed so hard in ages. One of the funniest things on TV so far this year (and probably last year too)!
A cynical and totally unnecessary programme-another example of the ageism that can be so prevalent in today’s ‘let’s mock the vulnerable’ society. It’s disgraceful that these people were used in this way.
a doc that didn’t lean slighty toward the wierd of frinton would be well dull. not worth watching.. this one, even if it did poke fun a little bit was entertaining(and thats all it did, nobody was hurt!) ..also its not as if they were presenting a factual all encompassing demographic study/report.. if somebody wants to do that then do, i wont watch it.. every interpreter of the world reserves the right to present it in which ever way they say fit.. thats the beauty of freedom of speach..its not as if we are prohibitted from challenging or questioning some documentative discourse.. the fact that this doc has caused so much discussion and critisism is testament to that, its also testement to the fact that we as a society are clever enough to make our own mind up about representations we see.. how boring would life be if every TV, art musical representation had to be completly factual.?. This was OBVIOUSLY an “artisitc” aproach to documenatry film making.. It wasn’t the 10 o’clock news. I think, have respect for the viewing public who are capable of reading or seeing in this case between the lines..
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