East of Ipswich – 1987 | 75 mins | Comedy, Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

East of Ipswich was originally part of BBC Two’s feature film strand Screen Two. The story was written by ex-Python Michael Palin and draws on his own memories of dreary holidays in grey coastal towns during the late 1950s and wonderfully captures the absurdity of the English middle-classes on vacation. The story progressively moves away from the perception of holiday hell and becomes a rites of passage tale. East of Ipswich was filmed in the Suffolk coastal town of Southwold.

Set in mid-1950s Britain, 17-year-old Richard Burrill (Edward Rawle-Hicks) finds himself spending the summer holiday’s in a sleepy Suffolk coastal resort rather than their annual family pilgrimage to Torquay. The family stay at the grey B&B of authoritarian landlady Miss Wilbraham (Joan Sanderson) who runs her B&B.

Constrained by his parent’s rules and bored with the tedium of a provincial holiday town, the hormonal Richard befriends the attractive Julia (Oona Kirsch), a fellow teenager on holiday with her own uptight father. Richard also meets Julia’s exchange-student companion, fiery Dutch girl Anna, and also confident local cad Edwin. Despite a mutual attraction between Richard and Julia, the shy teenager finds himself chaperoning the rebellious Anna. Finally, fate intervenes when Richard is asked to accompany Julia to the church ‘sausage sizzle’, but all doesn’t go quite according to plan after the teenagers bunk off to a local jazz club.