Rochester’s role in the film Great Expectations, will be featured on BBC One tonight.

The programme, David Lean In Close-Up with Jonathan Ross, will be on 10.35pm.

Film maker, Lean is featured on the show to talk about his career.

Two of his most famous films are Great Expectations and Brief Encounter, both were polled in the top five when the British Film Institute critics named the 100 Greatest British Films.

Great Expectations came in at number five and Brief Encounter was number two.

The Dickens’ classic has one of the most famous opening shots in the history of cinema, as the young Pip runs across the marshes.

These scenes were shot on an island on the River Medway.

The crew was based at the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel in Rochester, and while the film was being shot, Lean’s previous film was ready for its first test screening before the public. This was Brief Encounter.

Because Lean was tied up with Great Expectations, he arranged for the preview to be held in a cinema in Rochester.

It was a disaster.

On the Jonathan Ross show he talks about the story in an archive interview.

He explains a woman in the audience started laughing during the first big romantic scene involving Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.

She didn’t stop, and everybody else joined in.

Lean was devastated, and as he tells it, wondered how he could break into the laboratory and burn the negative.

Obviously if he’d done so, one of the great masterpieces of British cinema would have been destroyed.