Places features

...or is it REALLY about Marsden?

It could be said that it all started in West Yorkshire, after all it was in 1887 that Louis Le Prince, a French photographer working in Leeds, managed to create a few moving images of his back garden and, a few months later, did the same on Leeds Bridge. The moving picture was born - but then Le Prince mysteriously disappeared in 1890 and it was the Lumiere brothers who came to be hailed as the fathers of cinematography.

The first commercial showing of moving pictures in Great Britain took place in London in February 1896 but it's probable that the first film show out 'in the sticks' (using the Lumiere brothers' 'Machine') was at the Peoples' Palace music hall in Bradford just a couple of months later. The National Media Museum (formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film and TV) ironically now stands on this site.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Making moving pictures soon became all the rage and film companies sprang up across West Yorkshire. In other words, people were making pictures in Holmfirth long before they made them in Hollywood! As time went on the cameras moved out of the studios and film makers from further afield made their way 'up north,' looking for new locations.

Today, West Yorkshire's villages and towns continue to play a starring role in TV productions and film crews regularly descend on the area. Long-running series like A Touch of Frost and Emmerdale make it difficult to name every location used in the area - and there's many a celebrated film or television series that is now long forgotten - but why not read on to find out more about some of the bits of Kirklees, Calderdale, Bradford and Wakefield which have made West Yorkshire a star of the big and small screens? You might even discover that somewhere near you has played a starring role!

In Bradford ...

In the very early years Bradford was certainly the cinematic capital of Yorkshire. Film makers the Riley Brothers made films in Bradford and they also had branches in New York and Boston, but it was a film made in 1963 that really put the city on the movie-making map.

Bradford's 'Billy Liar' plaque

Billy Liar, considered by many to be one of the greatest British films of the 1960s, was shot entirely on location in Bradford. Tom Courtenay plays Billy, the undertaker's clerk, a compulsive liar who spends his days fantasising. The location of Billy's office can still be found in Southgate - look out for the plaque unveiled by the film's director John Schlesinger in 1996. The atmospheric Undercliffe Cemetery and Bradford's War and Queen Victoria memorials are among the city centre locations also used in the film.

Bradford also stars in Room at the Top. Now seen as one of the first of the British 'kitchen sink' dramas, back in 1959, when it was released the film was billed as a "savage story of lust and ambition". Laurence Harvey stars as 'angry young man,' Joe Lampton, the ambitious young accountant who gets involved with the boss's daughter as well as an older, married woman, with predictably tragic consequences. Simone Signoret won as Oscar for her performance as Lampton's lover. Some of the most pivotal scenes in the film take place in the Boy and Barrel pub in James Gate but Ivegate, Kirkgate and Westgate also feature. The film was based on the novel by Bingley librarian John Braine.

A star in itself: Bradford Alhambra

Tom Courtenay was back in Bradford in 1986, this time with Albert Finney, to play the title role in The Dresser. Finney is an old-style actor manager who has brought his touring company of players to a provincial theatre. The Alhambra provided a splendid location.

In recent years Bradford's screen image has often been far from glamorous. Writer Andrea Dunbar grew up in Buttershaw and the adaptation of her play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too - about two schoolgirls who have a fling with a married man - is set there. Band of Gold, a television drama series about prostitution, was set around Lumb Lane in Manningham.

Of course, such is the fame of the Bronte sisters that it was only natural that from the beginning attempts would be made to film their novels but although they may have lived in Haworth, few of their books have been filmed in the area. It is unlikely that Laurence Olivier went much beyond a Hollywood lot when he played Heathcliff in what is still the most celebrated celluloid version of Wuthering Heights, released in 1939. The Haworth moors were recreated at great expense among the Californian hills. However a later version starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes did use East Riddlesden Hall, just outside Keighley, as a location.

TV and film legend: A KWVR train

It was The Railway Children in 1970 that ensured that movie makers would keep on coming back to Keighley. Even today when you take a ride on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway you may find yourself looking out of the window wondering if a young Jenny Agutter will run alongside the train, waving. The railway was used again, to very different effect, by Pink Floyd and director Alan Parker in the 1982 film The Wall - based on the best-selling (and rather depressing) album of the same name. Born and Bred, starring James Bolam, has been one of the most recent television productions to use the railway, even though the series is set in Lancashire!

Blow Dry, scripted by Simon Beaufoy (who also wrote The Full Monty) sets out to tell the story of a Keighley hairdresser, played by Alan Rickman, but the film-makers preferred to use locations in Dewsbury and Batley.

And then, of course, there's Emmerdale, the country's second-longest running television soap opera. Over the years many day-trippers have poured into the village of Esholt hoping to recognise the odd cottage, and character, or have a drink in the Woolpack. Sadly for them, these days the series is made elsewhere on a closed set.

Find out more about films and TV in Calderdale, Kirklees in Wakefield by clicking on the 'NEXT' button below!

• Next