Ed Franklin and Celeste Dodwell at Funny Weather

ACTORS who met while starring in a West End show have switched from the stage to the page by opening a new bookshop together.

Celeste Dodwell – some may remember her as Melody Jones in Aussie soap Home and Away in her youth – and Ed Franklin are the proprietors of Funny Weather, up in Dartmouth Park.

Fate smiled on them when they starred together in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever at the Duke of York’s Theatre back in 2015.

The couple in Hay Fever at Duke of York’s in 2015

Nobody gets immediately rich from acting, and Ed worked at Waterstones in between parts.

He told me: “There was that fear when we started selling Kindles at Waterstones that we had let the fox into the hen house. Bookshops were seen to be in trouble.”

But he says people enjoy having a relationship with the printed word and the sense of having a physical object in their hands. “In the same way there has been a massive vinyl revival, people are still buying books – and particularly at independent bookshops,” he said.