Summerton Mill

Did You Know?

• Each episode begins with narration explaining that when the waterwheel at abandoned Summerton Mill turns, it returns to its original state with its former inhabitants.
• The second series was never broadcast in the UK, but was available on iTunes, with Series 1 available on DVD.
• The series was launched at MipJunior in 2006 by VGI Entertainment.

Production

Summerton Mill was based on Somerton Mill, a riverside property belonging to Pete Bryden. The project was first imagined and its pilot episode shot at this quiet location. Bryden and Ed Cookson handled set and character design, scriptwriting, video and sound editing, most of the animation for the first series, and the music composition and performance. A small crew was brought in for the second series, with James Cleland, who had been the assistant animator on the first series, becoming Director of Animation.

ScaryCat Studios created the props and puppets for both series. Silas Hawkins performed all the voices. His father, Peter, had voiced the Flower Pot Men, Captain Pugwash, and the Daleks in Doctor Who. Silas joined the production without a firm commitment, and shaped the voice of Mrs. Naybhur after a character his father voiced called Big Fat Rosie, from stories by Mary Danby Calvert that Peter had read on the radio programme Listen with Mother.

Silas thought the framing sequences at the start and end of each episode were ‘A.E. Housman-esque’—melancholy and elegiac for a children’s show, though not necessarily worse for that—since they suggested the watermill’s wheel, as it turned and eventually stopped, first summoned and then dismissed the ghosts or memories of the characters whose past comic adventures made up the episode’s main story.