Studio Gelling
Doctor Terror visits Elstree, 'Britain's Hollywood'
Film studios are constantly changing, in a perpetual state of flux. We mustn't be sad as this endless churn continues unabated.
Demolition crews pound Neptune House into the rubble.
The new Albert Square.
The BBC has sold up to new owners Fairbanks Studios and chaos reigns. Across the road, however, at Elstree Studios proper (where all the EastEnders interiors are filmed, along with the Buckingham Palace interiors of The Crown, the glitterballs of Strictly and the far from pointless Pointless) it's business as usual. I know this because I recently paid them a visit on account of my job. I haven't mentioned my job before? What do I do? Have you not guessed?.
The bar is packed with memorabilia, citing everything from The Avengers to Murder on the Orient Express to Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. Alongside it is the function room, scene of many a wrap party...and these are ongoing in the endless cycle of death and rebirth that studios like these or those in Hollywood (often called 'the American Elstree') see day in, day out.
Next up? Hot on the heels of Hamnet, which used the backlot here to film Shakespeare's Globe and Ann Hathaway's Cottage, a new remake of The Thomas Crown Affair is in the offing. But it's the classics that stir the blood. In the late seventies and early eighties, it was all Spielberg and Lucas (no wonder their films are full to the brim with British actors and crew). Before that it was Kubrick, everything from 2001: a Space Odyssey to A Clockwork Orange. I knew the corridors of the Overlook Hotel in the Shining were to be found here but surely the exterior was shot in Colorado? Nope: on a little earthen mound around the back. Why, Kubrick even LIVED nearby.
And if this wasn't enough, Hitchcock made Blackmail, Britain's first 'talkie', here. What history! You can't help admiring the George Lucas Stage too, though the only Star Wars filming here was on The Phantom Menace. When I visited, they were using it for Mock the Week. I thought that had finished?
The thought that the 'foreign cities' backlot where once the Saint and the Champions strode, is reputedly buried beneath this stage is too sad to contemplate.
I promised the Star Wars fans I know that I would track down the very spot where Darth Vader told Luke Skywalker that he was his father, filmed in Studios 1 and 2. The fact that these have been sold off and are now the Borehamwood Tesco's is neither here nor there.
The Borehamwood Tesco.
Innovation is everywhere. A major selling point of the single largest studio is that it has a back wall designed to crumble and collapse. The fact that such a stunt would cost over a million quid to engineer shouldn't put anyone off. Kubrick would have done it. And then gone for another thirty or forty takes.
But what of ATV, its legacy crushed under a hungry bulldozer? Okay, no one will perhaps mourn John Wilder but what of poor Kermit, Fozzie and Piggy? Simon Templar (the Saint)? Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)? Well, there's a redemptive final act.
For, while the exteriors are now destroyed, the INTERIORS were mostly filmed in Studio 7 which, now sporting a neon sign of The Saint, are alive and well. They live to fight another day. Welling up yet? Orchestra swells to a crescendo. Cut and print.