Do You Need Some Experienced Local Extras For Your Next Bluebell Railway Shoot?

Horsted Keynes is on TV in one shape or form (usually Horsted Keynes Bluebell Railway station) almost every week.
We will try to list below the latest local film news so that you can set the video!

WIND IN THE WILLOWS Filmed here in 1997 this essentially British film starred many of the "Monty Python" team. The special effects where the cast climb from a moving Bluebell Railway carriage was in fact set up in the Horsted Keynes coal siding. A huge painted scenery roll was wound behind a static train. Just like they did in the early silent movies! Another sequence involved the crew taking over the line at Freshfield. Here they managed to "crash" a locomotive without it ever leaving the tracks! How? Simple, they buried a mock-up of the green locomotive tender in the embankment.

STATION JIM filmed in several parts of the Bluebell Railway this delightful BBC Film was only shown in 2002 despite being filmed in a very wet and inclement autumn of 2000. Lots of Bluebell Railway action. The main station was at Kingscote just up the line from Horsted Keynes.

THE RAILWAY CHILDREN was of course filmed all along the Bluebell Railway. On one notable day there were three camera crews working at the same time! The film is available on video and DVD so do get it if you would like the best coverage of the Bluebell for ages. Nicely made, the kids will love it.
Enthusiasts' web site Bluebell Railway film site

CHARLOTTE GRAY had a very important scene filmed at Holywell waterworks where the film crew twice "blew up" a train at 2am on two successive nights (despite being a special effect it still made a very loud bang and smashed one of our windows in the process). The film lights had to be turned down as they interfered with planes landing at Gatwick Airport, the crew sidestepped "foot and mouth" restrictions, and the director went back to Australia soon after seeing the first preview! Available on video and DVD if you insist, the film is rubbish and cost Channel 4 a small fortune. The "Charlotte Gray" site disappeared from the web a few weeks after opening.

BBCtv for UK Television filmed at several places in the village at the end of January 2003. These were for the small promotional bits that are broadcast between TV programmes and featured some very well behaved and very cold dogs. As the items were for broadcast in the Spring the crew had to hose the thick snow away. Pity as the village looked magical with a blanket of snow on it.

NORTH AND SOUTH This BBC TV four-part adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's feisty and passionate love story, set across the social divide in the changing world of Victorian industrial society. Stars Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage was filmed at the Bluebell in some of the hottest weather of 2004! Who'd be an actor wearing a stovepipe hat and a Victorian collar in an 80 degree heat wave? Lots of "day for night" and smoke machines tried to give an impression of the very early railways.

Wash the snow away and pretend that it's spring!
The BBC filming for UK Television in midwinter outside the Green Man.

OTHER FILMS Ken Russell loved filming on The Bluebell Railway and around the village of Horsted Keynes. Many of his early works had scenes filmed here including "Listomania", "Mahler", and "Savage Messiah" where your webmaster as a young man appeared briefly as an extra on Horsted Keynes platform 1.

If you would like  to see the whole Horsted Keynes sequence then click above.

One of your webmasters was an extra passenger in a carriage during the filming but I must have been on the wrong side as now I can't recognise myself! If however you would care to look here you will find a picture of me when five years later I appeared as an Imperial Stormtrooper in "Star Wars".