THE culmination of a three-year filming project drew a sell-out audience and raised £23,000 for cancer charity Hope for Tomorrow on Saturday (May 18).

Chance Encounter, a gentle love story about a young couple who meet on a train one summer in the late 1950s, was given its world premiere at the Regal Theatre, Minehead, before an audience of 400.

It uses drone footage of what 1950s travellers would have seen during their journey, stations and film of the West Somerset Railway line between Bishops Lydeard and Minehead.

Members of Minehead-based drama group Barnstormers, whose chairman Hilary May was a Hope for Tomorrow Ambassador until her death in February, were also involved as were steam railway experts and enthusiasts.

Chance Encounter was shot in and around West Somerset in summer 2018, Chance Encounter was made by Wiltshire-based film makers Angela and Roger Calcutt with West Somerset script writer and production director Lynn Pearson.

The film was the result of an idea developed by Geoffrey Bray, executive chairman of Fleet Service Great Britain and a patron of Hope for Tomorrow, and the charity’s founder, Christine Mills, who died last year.

The charity, with its headquarters in Tetbury, is dedicated to bringing cancer treatment closer to patients’ homes by providing a Mobile Cancer Care Unit (MCCU), previously known as a Mobile Chemotherapy Unit, to every oncology centre within the UK.

There are currently 12 units operating across the UK, which last year treated more than 14,000 people.

More than 160 in the audience on Saturday had travelled on a West Somerset Railway steam train – the ‘Chance Encounter’, which included the Quantock Belle dining coaches.

They had lunch, and tea on the return journey to Bishops Lydeard, prepared and cooked by chefs from Claire’s Kitchen, based in Wootton Courtenay, and Hywel Jones, the Michelin-starred executive chef at Lucknam Park Hotel and Spa.

“The screening was the culmination of a fantastic day,” said Mr Bray.

“The energy and commitment of all the people to see the project through to fruition was very humbling.