POSTCARD FROM SOMERSET

Bob Barton takes a road trip with Bob Hope, peers at piers, and visits an Edwardian great-aunt and a 1960s hippy

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“I still chase women, but only downhill.” One of my favourite Bob Hope jokes (told when he was 70). The hilarious Road to... films, in which he starred with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, were required viewing in our household during my childhood. That memory drew me to an ordinary street of terraced houses in Weston-super-Mare. Number 20, Southend Road bears a blue plaque as the comedian's childhood home. Leslie Townes Hope, as he was christened, came from a family of West Country stonemasons. Apparently, his grandfather helped build Weston's seafront wall. This itself could be the beginning of a joke. Anyone familiar with the resort knows the sea (the Bristol Channel) is a mile out and requires a major hike for anyone intent on going for a paddle at low tide.

It's the only town I know that has a museum in a gas showroom. Of course, it's no longer full of boilers and geysers, but the structure housing Weston Museum (01934 621028, westonmuseum.org) is spacious and grand. A giant photograph occupying a whole wall shows the men of the Weston Gaslight Company who built the town's high-pressure pipeline. It left me in no doubt about the building's provenance. Upstairs, I admired Punch and Judy puppets dating from the 1890s. They would have entertained generations of children with their outrageous antics. I recalled the time I was taken as a toddler to such a seaside show and insisted on looking behind the rear curtain to see how this strange “machine” worked. I'm told the puppeteer was as annoyed as Mr Punch himself.