Village of Turville tunes in after TV and film appearances.

The Chiltern village of Turville is well known in the worlds of television and the movies. NIGEL HUDDLESTON visits the village pub that certainly warrants a butcher's.

It's only a minor disappointment to find that Toot Sweets aren't on the dessert menu at the Bull & Butcher in the village of Turville, nestled in a valley of the Chiltern Hills and overlooked from the hilltop by the windmill that featured in the film version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

The film's famous confectionery may not feature at the pub, but the Bull & Butcher menu does include a nod to the village's role in the film in the form of Chitty Chitty bangers & mash.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang isn't Turville's only claim to movie and TV fame. It was the setting for the TV dramatisation of the book Goodnight Mr Tom, it doubles as one of the villages in ITV's Midsomer Murders and provides the church for The Vicar of Dibley (St Mary the Virgin is now under the watchful gaze of its second real-life lady vicar and has an annual festive parade of local pets, just as in a Christmas episode of the show).

Local resident Jeremy Paxman is even on the parish council, apparently. Lydia Botha, co-owner of the Bull & Butcher, observes that this 'must make for some interesting meetings'.

A parish of media productions

Filming has just finished on a new series of TV's Miss Marple, which saw Michelle Ryan (aka Zoe from EastEnders) drop in for a drink.

There's a parish committee to co-ordinate the film work and liaise with production companies. Residents get a cash bonus from the pot every Christmas to compensate for the disruption caused to village life.

'A lot of film companies know it's a well- organised place to come and film, and that they can treat it like a film studio,' says Lydia.

Past Bull & Butcher menus have featured a Midsomer burger and a Dibley pudding.

This may all sound a bit gimmicky, but the kitchen theme at the pub is borne out in its highquality ingredients, a focus on simple, home- cooked British food, and great presentation.

The bangers and mash, for example, doesn't skimp on content for the sake of making a good joke. The dish features a trio of Toulouse, wild boar & apple and pork & leek sausages, served with onion jam and a rich ale gravy, coming in at £10.95.

Other regular mains include braised shank of lamb with flageolet beans and shallot casserole (£13.95), while the current specials list has whisky-flamed venison medallions with Dauphin-oise potatoes, braised red cabbage and crushed roots (£13.95).

Included among the regular starters is grilled goat's cheese with strawberry dressing, while the specials board has potted goose with gooseberry relish (both £6.95).

Lydia Botha has lived in Turville since 1986. In 2003 she turned her back on the commute to London, where she ran an internet property business, to take over the pub with husband Hugo.

The previous leaseholder was due to leave and the Brakspear-owned pub was due to close five days before the Bothas' application went in.

'It was a bit of a wild card,' says Lydia, 'because we'd never run a pub before, but there was one guy at Brakspear who had faith in us, and we never looked back.'

With the exception of a modern-day car parking problem, the Bull & Butcher is as close to the rural idyll as you're ever likely to find in the pub world - low ceilings, fine local real ale and the smell of wood smoke mingling with the aromas from the kitchen. The main bar feature has a 50ft well, unearthed in 2000 when an extension was built, and which won the pub an English Heritage award a year later.

Return of traditional pub values

Lydia says her aim on taking the pub over was to get some traditional pub values back into it.

'It had peaked in the late 1990s. The guy who ran it did a good job, but he put off a lot of people. He'd turned it into being a bit more of a restaurant.

'We decided we'd open all day and do Ploughman's and good pub food, as opposed to trying to specialise in one area. It's such a broad range of customers from business people who come for lunch from Henley, Marlow and Wycombe, to tourists, to locals, to walkers. We get lots of people from London at the weekends.'

She adds: 'I'm pretty confident that we've built up a good reputation and people are coming here because of the quality of food.

'It's slightly cheaper than it used to be and we also cater for the light-lunch market. You can sit and enjoy half a bitter without being shoved off your seat.

'A lot of people just come to the pub and want a sandwich, but they come here and see we do all this other food. My philosophy is make it as inviting as possible to get as many people in as you can, get the traffic through and hopefully they'll come back another time.

The pub has 55 covers and does between 700 and 800 a week, with plans to convert an adjacent barn into a function room for 100 and for a museum to commemorate Turville's movie history and the pub's own chequered past. It was the scene of a real-life murder in 1942, when licensee Lacey Beckett shot his wife and dog in an upstairs bedroom before, in modern parlance, turning the gun on himself in what was then the orchard but is now the car park.

These days the crime in Turville is all fictional, but the food and the beer at the Bull & Butcher are, thankfully, deliciously real.

English eats and foreign treats make up the menu

While the principal food focus at the Bull & Butcher is on classic English dishes, the kitchen staff have been allowed the odd night to let their creative juices flow into new areas.

The pub has a strong South African influence among the staff and special events have included South African nights with authentic Afrikaans music and fresh biltong.

There's also been a Thai food night, a tapas evenings and regular 'fish market' nights on Fridays, when the fresh seafood delivery lands.

'It comes straight from the market, and we do huge platters with lobster and everything else. If you go to a seafood restaurant you often get a platter where you know there are things missing, because you know what should be on there. [Because we don't do that] it makes the evening an event.'

The regular menu uses local produce 'where we can', says Lydia. 'Because the turnover is so high it's difficult to do everything local. We do get a lot of local game, pheasant and even squirrel. We do it in a pie and it tastes like chicken, and sells like hotcakes. Game goes well.'

Using technology to keep in touch with customers

The Bull & Butcher won a marketing award from Brakspear soon after Lydia took over the pub, largely because of the way it used the internet to bring new customers in and keep previous ones informed.

The pub's website features a detailed history of the pub and the village, plus menus and a scroll through a calendar of special events at the pub.

Lydia says: 'My husband [the couple are now separated] was an internet programmer and set up the website before we even took over, and we quickly had a marketing database. There are about 700 members on there, and they all receive notice of any events we're holding through an e-mail.'

Lydia belongs to the school that puts great store by word-of-mouth publicity, but has used other means to bring new business in. 'I have done a little bit of advertising,' she says. 'The only time it did work was on Valentine's Night when the whole pub was full of couples from Henley. But word-of-mouth is the most precious form of advertising you can get.'

For more on the pub's award-winning website, visit www.thebullandbutcher.com