This week’s Wonderland focuses on Frinton-on-Sea, the genteel, blue-rinsed, time-warp town on the Essex coast where it’s always 1959. Specifically, it covers the residents’ battle to maintain their manned level crossing, which has acted like a gateway to the town for over 100 years and helped keep its character firmly in the last century, with commerce-free beaches, half-day closing and a solitary, and much-opposed, pub.

At Radio Times, however, we can’t help but feel the documentary- makers have missed out on a far stranger story within Frinton itself. For halfway down the town’s main street, above a disused office that used to be the Woolwich Building Society, is a radio station called Big L, now home to former BBC stalwarts Mike Read, “Diddy” David Hamilton and Adrian John.

It’s an odd location for a radio station, but one partly explained by cheap rent and a nostalgic affection by the founders for the old pirate stations – Radios Caroline and London – which were moored just off the coast. Exasperated by the blandness of modern formatted radio, as they see it, Big L has returned to radio’s piratical roots to bring back personality broadcasting.

Stranger still: because Frinton is 63 miles from London, the station’s DJs share a house in the town from Monday to Friday. At the end of a quiet, residential cul-de-sac, in a comedy conflation of Smashie and Nicey and Stella Street, Big L’s DJs live out a middle-aged, suburban version of pirate radio.

“It is a sitcom,” acknowledges Read, 57, still sporting the same hairstyle, tinted glasses and inimitable ensemble of black slacks and shirt with white trainers. “There can be anything from one to five of us in the house but we get on so well and we laugh so much, our sides ache.”

Hamilton, 69, tanned and not quite as diminutive as one might expect, concurs: “For Christmas, I gave Mike something he really wanted – a copy of my autobiography.” He laughs. “In return, he gave me a book published by Viz called Roger’s Profanisaurus and it has every piece of rhyming slang, every rude word you can imagine. Really entertaining. Just reading from it over dinner caused many laughs around the table.”

Not for the last time today, I feel I might be the subject of an elaborate hoax. Diddy David entertaining DJ dinner guests with a book that could make the Marquis de Sade blush?

“It’s very much like a student house,” offers Read. “Some nights we play Scrabble. Some nights we’ll get the guitars out and have a singsong or we’ll just be writing. Adrian John’s doing a degree in psychology. I’ll sit there writing my novel, so it’s a balance. It’s not all being silly.”

We’re currently sitting in a café just over the road from Big L’s HQ. Mobility scooters, seemingly the town’s favoured form of transport, regularly glide by outside. What, one wonders, have they made of Frinton?

“It’s polite. People are friendly and courteous and I think anyone would like that,” says Read. “Particularly compared with London, where the only conversation you get is, ‘Enter your pin number’. It’s a time warp. It does feel like a 1950s town when the old sun blinds come down.”

Integral to the town’s appeal is its tennis club, where Read and Hamilton regularly play and Sir Cliff Richard is an honorary member. With a thatched-roof club house, immaculate lawn and hard court facilities, it’s not difficult to believe Read’s claims that it was once second only to Wimbledon with a roster of the rich and famous playing there. “One evening last year,” recalls Read, “we were at the club saying, ‘It must have been great in the 20s, with all the stars that liked to play here – Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. All the stories they must have told.’ But then I said, ‘Yes, but one day they’ll talk about the night they played naked tennis in the rain down here in 2007.’ Everyone said, ‘When was that?’ And I said, ‘Tonight!’ And four of us took all our clothes off and played on the grass courts in this teeming warm rain. All the usual jokes were coming out: ‘How many balls your end?’ ”

“It actually did wonders for the sales of button mushrooms,” chortles Hamilton. While Hamilton wasn’t involved in this historic moment – “I failed the medical” – Read isn’t saying who else was. “Three guys and one woman, let’s just say that,” he chuckles. “It wasn’t rude or naughty. It was just one of those crazy nights. It was hammering down, but we were screaming with laughter and it was funny rather than sleazy.”

There must be something in the water because Hamilton then mentions he was holidaying in this vicinity that he lost his virginity. “I was 15. I met a girl of 16,” he reflects with a twinkle. “I met her on the bumper cars and we ended up on the cliffs over there where a boy became a man!”

Our arrival at the house does nothing to diminish the day’s mounting sense of oddness. “When I first arrived,” says Hamilton, “I checked out
my bedroom, opened the wardrobe and found I could see from my bedroom into Mike’s. You can see the problem. And it did happen one morning that we both got up at the same time, stark naked, opened up the wardrobes and there we were on the other side.”

“David got excited for a moment, until he realised he was looking at me,” adds Read in the manner of one who’s performed this routine before. “I saw what I thought was my reflection,” joshes Hamilton, “and for the first time in my life thought, ‘Hey! I’m tall, dark and handsome.’”

However strange the bedroom arrangements, they appear perfectly normal compared with the sitting room. It bears the telltale signs of student living, with scruffy carpet and sofa, a broken chair, a mini-football game, empty bottles of red wine on the table and a DVD on top of the TV bearing the legend “Eight Vintage Sex Education Films”.

But around the window ledges, there’s something not found in any student house. It’s Read’s collection of “Choc Art”, a style he’s pioneered since his time in Frinton, using confectionery as its principal medium. His prolific artistic output is well known. He’s written more than 40 books and ten musicals, the most notorious of which, Oscar Wilde: the Musical, closed after one night and atrocious reviews in 2004, costing him a fortune. (Worryingly, days after this interview he’s travelling to New York to direct an off-Broadway revival of it.) Although he claims to have sold many art pieces, I can only say I don’t know much about art, but I know what I don’t like.

“What do you think that is?” he asks terrifyingly, pointing to a canvas. I offer a few desperate platitudes. “No! It’s a map of the world made from Liquorice Allsorts. It’s called It Takes All Sorts to Make a World.”

Indeed it does. As I leave the town, past the sign bearing the words “Enduring Values”, I look in vain for another sign that would explain so much – that Frinton is in fact twinned with Royston Vasey.

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