Excuse Me, Wells, Can I Have Your Autograph?

We took some downtime in Conwy the other day and were lucky enough to have an impressive collection of DVDs at our disposal at the B&B.  I’d wanted to see Hot Fuzz for ages, so when I saw it on the shelf, I snagged it with a quickness.

From the same guys who brought us Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz follows Nicholas Angel, an overachiever cop from London who gets forcibly transferred to a village in the boonies for making his colleagues look bad.  All seems incredibly boring in Sandford until a series of murders pushes Officer Angel into super cop mode.

On his first night in town, Nicholas walks out of the pub and makes a wish in the town fountain.  When I saw the fountain, I thought, “What the…???  No way…”  The fountain looked very familiar, but I thought that deja vu would be easy in a country like this.

In a scene a few minutes later, however, I saw him jogging by a very familiar moat and castle which I instantly recognized.  I boxed Charity’s arm and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s the Bishop’s Palace in Wells!!”  She didn’t believe me, until he ran around the corner, by the familiar fountain, and right up the street, stopping outside the Swan Hotel, two doors down from the inn we stayed in.  Well, she didn’t even really believe me then as I had to rewind and pause so she could clearly read the hotel name and accompanying signage.  She thought it was a common hotel name, which it might be, but I spent a lot of time outside of that place while she went in to inquire about vacancy and rates, so I was kind of in tune with the signage.

In any case, I would have enjoyed the movie anyway as it was a spoof-homage to cop/action movies (as Shaun was to the  zombie/horror genre), but I loved it even more since I was just in that village a few days prior and recognized a lot of the settings.  OK, I guess the latter’s not hard since the town centre is kind of tiny, but you know what I mean.  Very cool.  And kind of like, “what are the chances??”

We have passed through many, many villages and stayed in only a handful.  I thought Wells was a neat little town, and now, I feel lucky to have stumbled upon it in the first place.

Fountain in Wells town square
Fountain in Wells town square

2 comments

  1. How cool is that! I loved that movie when Bill and I watched it. I remember how quaint the town seemed. P.S. I can totally see you trying to convince Charity that the town in the movie was Bath! Hee hee!!!

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