Residents in an English village have been denied broadband and phone services for three weeks after a car fire damaged Openreach's telecoms pole and fiber optic cables.

In what sounds like a rejected plotline from The Archers, the damaged infrastructure has not been fixed since August 13, when the vehicle caught fire.

Rother District Council told the BBC that repairs could not previously take place because the vehicle needed to stay in place for a police investigation, but that the vehicle could now be moved.

The cause of the fire is still unknown.

An Openreach spokesperson told the BBC: “We’re aware of an incident where a third-party vehicle fire damaged part of our network, affecting a small number of customers.

"Our engineers are working to get everyone back up and running as quickly and safely as possible. We're sorry for the disruption and appreciate everyone's patience."

The village of Catsfield, located in the ceremonial county of East Sussex, has approximately 900 residents. Many have been impacted by the ongoing outage.

Wilfrid John Brett, 93, told BBC News: "At the moment I can't ring out, what I'm worried about more than anything is if I collapse during the night and can't tell anybody."

His cousin, David, added: "John has carers who come once a day for about 30 minutes, that's been the saving grace.

"But it still leaves John without any support for most the day until the phone company pull their finger out."

Network outages can occur for a number of reasons. EE, BT, and Three all suffered outages in June, but these were resolved relatively quickly.