Who do they think they’re kidding? The East Yorkshire town of Bridlington is planning to twin with the fictional seaside resort of Walmington-on-Sea, which as fans of the classic BBC sitcom will know, is home to the doughty men of Dad’s Army.

Bridlington was chosen last year as a key filming location for a new big-screen adaptation of the classic TV series, starring Bill Nighy as Sergeant Wilson, Sir Michael Gambon as Private Godfrey, and Toby Jones as Captain Mainwaring. Catherine Zeta Jones takes the role of a glamorous reporter tasked with filing a story on the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard.

Forever in the shadow of the rather more popular Whitby and Scarborough, Bridlington is hoping to use this twinning wheeze to attract visitors by associating itself permanently with the Dad’s Army brand.

Tom Courtenay (centre) who plays Corporal Jones, on the set of the new Dad’s Army film in Bridlington. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA

The town is already twinned with Millau in the Pyrenees and the German spa resort of Bad Salzuflen in North Rhine-Westphalia. But ligging dignitaries in those exotic metropoles needn’t worry that their regular jollies to the Yorkshire seaside will be a thing of the past: the new twin will not replace the old, according to David Hinde, Bridlington’s record-breaking town crier (he reached 114.8 decibels at Sewerby Hall in 2013) and a key cog in the clockwork of Bridlington Old Town Association.

“We won’t be getting rid of the old ones,” Hinde said. “This is just a bit of fun, a marketing tool to try to encourage economic growth in the town.”

He said Bridlington had already seen a 134% increase in bookings since filming last year, but that they still wanted more visitors. “We think interest will snowball when the film is released in February,” he said. Hinde has a cameo in the movie as Walmington’s town crier.



Toby Jones as George Mainwaring with Catherine Zeta-Jones as Rose Winters. Photograph: Universal Pictures/PA

Usually when a town twins with another it means local schoolchildren take part in language exchanges and the mayor from one pops up to cut the odd ribbon in the other. But if Bridlington is given permission by the relevant copyright holders to twin with Walmington-on-Sea, the relationship will likely not extend beyond new signs on the way into the old town and a Dad’s Army heritage trail, said Hinde.

Walmington-on-Sea is supposed to be on the Kent coast, but much of the original TV show was filmed in Norwich. Screen Yorkshire, a regional agency which tries to woo film companies to the county, beat off competition from a number of other seaside resorts to lure Dad’s Army to Bridlington for the new film.

The cast of the original Dad’s Army TV series. Photograph: Douglas Miller/Getty Images

If it goes ahead, Bridlington will not be the first UK town to have a fictional twin. Last November York twinned with Jorvik, the historical name for the North Yorkshire city, and in 2002 Wincanton in Somerset was twinned with Ankh-Morpork from the bestselling Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. Back then, Somerset county council wanted Ankh-Morpork added to the signs but killjoys in Whitehall refused, saying twin towns had to actually exist.

The practice of twinning towns began in Keighley in West Yorkshire in 1905. Keighley was the first British town to forge a “sister cities” link with Suresnes and Puteaux, France.

After the second world war, the practice took off in earnest, with community leaders keen to heal the divisions of the conflict.

Sometimes the twins share a common bond. Coventry, which suffered heavy bombing in the second world war, twinned with Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and then Dresden, which had suffered similar fates.



Dad’s Army is released on 6 February 2016.