There's now a better basis than fallible memory to help you judge how the BBC's new version of Little Dorrit compares with Christine Edzard's account of it 20 years ago: the Guardian, I see from Saturday's paper, is offering the Edzard on DVD. There's another question, though, that has yet to be asked: how does the new Little Dorrit compare with the much-praised version made at Bungalow Town, West Sussex, in 1920?
I came across the story of Bungalow Town in the Marlipins Museum, Shoreham-by-Sea, last week. The settlement began in the 1870s on the then largely deserted shingle spit that shields the mouth of the Adur river, when a fisherman decided to make a home for himself out of disused railway carriages. Others copied him - including a music-hall star called Marie Loftus, who invited her showbiz friends to see the ingenious home she'd had made, with her railway carriages decked out with wooden cladding to make it look like a conventional bungalow. Soon these desirable ex-railway residences, complete with gables and wings and balconies, were spreading along the spit. One early arrival was another music-hall star, Will Evans, who, with a stage designer called Francis Lyndhurst, formed the Sunny South Film Company to make short comedy films at a 19th-century fort at the eastern end of the beach. In 1915 Lyndhurst set up a more ambitious company that created a purpose-built studio before running out of money and collapsing.
Into the breach came a Manchester outfit called the Progress Film Company, which had picked out Shoreham as an ideal place to film in, for its situation between the sea and the downs, its freedom from fog, and its excellent light. A director called Sidney Morgan set to work on the first of 17 films completed within three summers. Most starred his daughter Joan, a saucer-eyed ingenue who was only 14 when they started. Sidney recruited a basic repertory company, some of whom would later be famous - Sybil Thorndike was one. Most lived in a 20-bed railway-carriage bungalow called Studio Rest.
Morgan had two great successes, adapted by him and shot by his ingenious cinematographer, Stanley Mumford. One was The Mayor of Casterbridge, with Thomas Hardy himself turning up in his wheelchair to watch the proceedings. The other was Little Dorrit. Towards the end of her life (she died in 2004), Joan Morgan singled it out as her father's greatest achievement.
Progress had promised to make Bungalow Town "the Los Angeles of British productions," but a series of setbacks in 1922 put paid to that. The Morgans moved on. The company suffered, as did all British companies then, from the ruthless competition of US studios. And a fire broke out which, though it spared the main studio, destroyed Studio Rest. Only Mumford and his brother were there when it happened. Once they'd rescued the most valuable contents, Stanley set up his camera and recorded the conflagration for posterity.
Progress pulled out, and a new company took over, but it soon foundered too. Bungalow Town continued to grow, with more recourse now to conventional building methods rather than railway carriages, but the cameras ceased to whirr. What finally did for the place was the threat of invasion. In 1940, the War Department gave the bungalow-owners 48 hours to leave, and went on to blast away the majority of their homes. Soon much of the territory, overgrown and deserted, was back to where it had been before Marie Loftus discovered it.
Today - no longer known as Bungalow Town but as Shoreham Beach - it's a lattice of owner-occupier roads much like the ones you might find on the edge of any well-to-do inland town. Here and there, you may spot some of the earlier bungalows; one is said to reveal even now its railway-carriage origins. But the jolly bohemian life that flourished here in its days as a thespian colony is no longer in evidence.
As for Morgan's version of Little Dorrit, that too is no longer with us. The museum has found only fragments. Yet it hasn't given up hope that the rest might turn up in some old tin trunk or cobwebbed cupboard or cluttered attic. Such things have happened. Should you have such trunks or cupboards or attics, prepare to search them now, before the BBC1 run of Little Dorrit is over.
• McKie's Gazetteer, by David McKie, has just been published wherever@btinternet.com
