Dinah Lord can barely move for high-end TV and film shoots in her neck of the woods
In the summer of 2023, a small city of Winnebagos and cranes sprang up overnight, covering the fields where I live in rural north Hertfordshire. The roads were closed as A-listers were filmed driving up to the school featured in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The location was a huge former boarding school that had gone out of business during the pandemic. And then, 48 hours later, Hollywood disappeared, leaving no trace.
I’m now struck by how much this is a reflection of the scope of film and TV production in the RTS East region. There’s a great deal of activity, from big-budget finance to crowd-funded projects – although it’s often quite difficult to find out exactly where the action is in this large region that stretches from Bedfordshire, through Cambridgeshire to the coasts of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk.
There are two parts to the industry here – the wealthy, growing studio ecology in south Hertfordshire and another, not so well-off, community of hugely talented creatives and production companies.
Understanding the level and range of activity and identifying and supporting the talent within the region has been a priority of RTS East over the past few years.
Certainly, the outlook for the major studios is rosy. Here’s a striking fact: Wicked was the biggest box-office film in the UK of 2024, following close on the success of Barbie in 2023. Wicked was filmed at Sky Studios Elstree and Barbie at Warner Bros. Leavesden, meaning the two leading box-office films of 2024 and 2023 were both made in Hertfordshire. And while total UK box office success is still 22% behind 2019’s pre-pandemic £1.3bn, PwC predicts a growth trajectory, with revenue expected to rebound to pre-Covid levels, growing at 6% year-on-year to 2028.
The evidence of this growth is there in the raft of productions under way in Hertfordshire – among them a new Guy Ritchie movie at Warner Bros. Leavesden and the return of Margot Robbie to our region in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights at Sky Studios Elstree.
When you start to dig about a bit, the scale and range of what is filmed here is really surprising. From The Day of the Jackal to Paddington in Peru, Strike: The Ink Black Heart to Deadpool & Wolverine, filming in England helped 31 film and high-end TV productions that came out last year to shoot here in the East.
And production spreads across the region: Creative England’s report on filming activity in Cambridgeshire last year shows that, while more than half the productions were filming for only one to three days, the rest were ensconced in the county for considerably longer.
The East also provides many of TV’s returners: Strictly and EastEnders come out of Elstree in Hertfordshire; The Only Way is Essex, filmed in Brentwood, is on its 35th series; 24 hours in Police Custody has been filmed for 10 years in the Bedfordshire police stations of Luton and Bedford; and Grantchester has reached its 10th series in Cambridge.
New series gaining traction are also coming out of the region – The Jury: Murder Trial was filmed in Chelmsford and the next season is planned to be shot in Cambridge. Ludwig is also filming its second series in Cambridge, and Sweetpea series two is under way in Essex.
Alongside all this, talented directors, editors and production companies based in the region make a range of outstanding independent programmes without a well-established network or the broadcaster and local initiatives other regions have benefited from.
The priority for RTS East is to seize the opportunities that both parts of the industry in this region offer to nurture a vibrant independent production sector.
Dinah Lord is Chair of RTS East and CEO of Caravan.
