Film-TV Section:
This being a campaign site to promote the region as a media centre, we now 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.

Terence Stamp as Sergeant Troy demonstrating his swordsmanship at Dorset's Maiden Castle, in Far From The Madding Crowd, 1967.
Latest feature: "Wessex At War - On Screen" page .

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

Peter O'Toole, Petula Clark, and the boys of Sherborne School in the 1969 Goodbye Mr Chips, scripted by Terence Rattigan and filmed at Sherborne in north Dorset

This section of the website covers writers and works with a strong connection to the south-central region.
(Latest Updates: Letters To America, From Bournemouth; WWII And Local Literature; Dennis Wheatley Rides Again.)

Jane Austen: An Unrequited Love, by Poole-based biographer Dr Andrew Norman, is the latest Austen biography, and uncovers new information about her 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 2010

See The Pulp Film Adaptation, Read the Better Book Dept: The new BBC HD screen version of The Day of the Triffids shown over New Year’s and just out on DVD has marginal local interest in itself (it abandons most of the novel’s local settings), but it does draw attention to the more thoughtful novel. [more]

The Moonraker (1957) is finally being released on DVD January 18th (by Optimum), a Technicolor swashbuckler fondly remembered by many as an attempt at a "British western." (Its roots are in the many British TV series of the era about noble outlaw heroes like Robin Hood, and true to form, it comes complete with old-fashioned ballad.) Directed by David MacDonald, it has a largely local setting, from Stonehenge to Lacock Abbey to Lulworth's Stair Hole, where the final swordfight between romantic Cavalier king's man George Baker and Cromwellian agent Peter Arne takes place [see below] as a ship arrives to take the future Charles II to safety abroad. The central section is set in the clifftop Windwhistle Inn (where Sylvia Syms is the sympathetic barmaid), the script being based on a play by a former film censor turned playwright. The story is vaguely fact-based - Charles's 1651 escape to Holland via Sussex was partly across west Dorset and Wiltshire, his various close calls with Cromwell's soldiery providing dramatic material for romantic historical novels and films ever since.

Latest entries on film-TV productions chronology page: Bright’s Boffins 1970; Return Of The Psammead 1993; The Buccaneers 1995; Creatives Grow Better In The South West (aka The Harvest) 2008; The Tesco Bomber 2009; Cranford Xmas special 2009; Die Rose von Kerrymore 2001; Far From The Madding Crowd 2009; The Day Of The Trffids 2009.