Film-TV Section:
This being a campaign site to promote the region as a media centre, we have a set of web pages addressing the issues raised in our earlier coverage of the local film-tv production scene. There's a chronological listing, a production history, a locations map, and full-page separate features covering a film, film-maker, or location of particular local interest.



Meryl Streep on the Lyme Regis Cobb in west Dorset, with the Undercliff wood section of the Jurassic Coast visible in the background.

This section of the website covers writers and works with a strong connection to the south-central region.
(Latest Feature page [1-5-11]: Setting The Scene In Wessex: The 17th Century In Literature And Drama.)

Thomas Hardy: Behind The Mask, by Poole-based biographer Dr Andrew Norman, is the latest [March 2011] Hardy biography, with new information about his carefully-guarded private life.

Thomas Hardy with his bicycle: when the bicycle first became popular, allowing country folk to travel more easily, Hardy began to assist in the early promotion of Wessex as "Hardy Country," which would become the basis of regional tourism when the automobile arrived.

South Central MediaScene 2012

Crime Time
Last month, the popular press were running stories that crime has replaced romance as the nation's top literary genre. (Previously, to tie in with Valentine's Day, we covered the romance genre with a short-list piece as our last item, here. This press coverage was in the wake of Valentine's Day and National Storytelling Week, an annual national programme to get more people reading. The crime-v-romance genre-trends analysis was based on the royalties authors get from the library system (called Public Lending Right), thus indicating the most-borrowed books. This trend has been remarked upon before, said to be a sign of the times - the result of living in an anxious "post- 9/11" world beset by terrorist threat and economic uncertainty.
At present, we are approaching another official event to promote reading, World Book Night on Monday 23 April, a spinoff from UNESCO’s World Book Day. (While WBD is held elsewhere 23 April, the UK confusingly holds its WBD the first Thursday in March, to deliberately avoid the April date, which is Shakespeare’s birth and death date, and often coincides with Eastertime school hols; thus the UK’s WBD-spinoff event WBN is held on UNESCO’s original WBD date, 23 April.) In terms of local-interest events, there is a tie-in WBN event during the Bournemouth Festival of Words (21-27 April), and libraries around the region may be offering as their giveaway book a local-interest title (from the official WBN list of 25 titles, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day would seem to offer the most local-interest content).
Of course, one way to get people reading is to focus on local-interest examples, where readers (including future writers) can relate more easily to the setting, i.e. see better, through their own familiarity with the setting, how that particular type of novel or story works artistically. Though some works or writers are not well-known, locally we have plenty of examples from the most popular literary genre of all, in fact more than enough for a web-page in our ‘Setting The Scene In Wessex’ series. Thus we are putting up our guide to locally-set crime fiction and drama in several stages, with part one covering the early days of smuggling, Gothic and sensation novels, through the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction, up to WWII, here: Setting The Scene In Wessex: The Crime Novel & Drama, Part I

Romantic Fiction & Drama For Valentine's
Since the press as usual at this time of year have been running travel features etc to tie in with the Valentine’s Day weekend (and half-term week), it’s worth considering our own area as a romantic setting for fiction and drama. [read more].

Ken Russell 1927-2011
New Forest resident Ken Russell, the region’s most long-established filmmaker, who began his career with arts documentaries in the 1960s, died at Lymington shortly before the Xmas holidays. BBC2 has done a memorial documentary, A Bit Of A Devil, and BBC4 broadcast his films Women In Love and its sequel The Rainbow, while BBC3 aired his rarely-seen The Boy Friend. BBC4 also showed his (also rarely-seen) 1962 docu-drama Elgar, which changed how arts documentaries were made. The Rex Cinema in Wareham showed his 1977 Valentino, which was part-filmed in Bournemouth (Russell-Cotes Museum as the star's 1920s Hollywood home etc). Ken in fact often shot scenes for his films locally, regardless of where they were set, and rather than attempt another blog item here (we’ve done several previous items on him) as an obit, we’re currently putting together a dedicated web-page on the various local links in his life and work.

South Central MediaScene 2011

Would You Believe Creative South-Central England?
The south-central region will again have no official recognition in the recent "Creative England" government consultation, but a new Writers Guild Of Great Britain initiative might be the start of something [read more]. [Updated 14-4-11]

World Book Day, Local Style
March 3rd/5th is World Book Day and Night, and the event with the most related press coverage concerns one of our many local-interest authors [read more].

For earlier blog entries, see:
South Central MediaScene 2011
South Central MediaScene 2010
South Central MediaScene 2009
South Central MediaScene 2008
South Central MediaScene 2007
South Central MediaScene 2006
South Central MediaScene 2005