DVD launch is big success

Buy photos » Evesham Mayor, Robert Raphael, and Mayoress, Diana Raphael, came along to promote the launch of The Market Gardener at The Regal Cinema recently. (s)

MORE than 150 people turned out to view The Badsey Society's launch of its latest DVD at The Regal Cinema.

The Market Gardener took two years to make and documents the life of market gardening families in the Vale of Evesham.

The film uses archive footage, interviews and old photographs and the result is an intriguing look at a way of life fast disappearing.

It was masterminded by Aldington born Will Dallimore who has been involved with the society's previous films and acted as director, editor and narrator for this production.

The film, which received funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, includes several interviews with market gardeners and their families, including 88-year-old George Keen. One of the highlights of the film was the reading of a letter which the schoolboy George Keen had written in 1933 about life in a market gardening community, when he was a pupil at Badsey Council School; this was one of a series of letters written for the BBC at the instigation of Sir John Russell of the Rothamsted Research Institute in Hertfordshire. Four pupils from Blackminster Middle School provided the voice-overs for the young letter-writers of 1933.

Anyone who missed out on the screening of The Market Gardener at The Regal can see a second showing tonight (Friday) at the Wheatsheaf Inn in Badsey at 7.30pm.

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