Television and Film
Wirral has hosted a variety of different films and television programmes. Chariots of Fire was filmed at various locations on the Wirral including the Oval Sports Centre, Bebington and the Woodside Ferry Terminal while the Ealing comedy, "The Magnet" (1950), was filmed in Wallasey and New Brighton.
More recently, The 51st State was partly filmed around the docks in Birkenhead and most recently Awaydays, based on a novel of the same name by Kevin Sampson, was filmed extensively in Wirral.
The Queensway Tunnel in Birkenhead is also featured in the Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 during the scene where Harry and Hagrid escape on a flying motorcycle and pass through the tunnel. The scene was filmed while the tunnel was closed for repairs.
In television, sitcom Watching, produced by Granada Television between 1987 and 1993, was partly set and filmed at various Wirral locations, particularly Meols. More recently, Mike Bassett: Manager, starring Ricky Tomlinson was a follow-up to the film Mike Bassett: England Manager, and featured a fictional football club called Wirral County, a parody of Tranmere Rovers, who Bassett (Tomlinson) managed after being sacked from the England job. It is also believed that the Lime Pictures production Hollyoaks films occasionally, on location, in Wirral.
Read more about this topic: Wirral Peninsula
Famous quotes containing the words television and/or film:
“In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.”
—New Yorker (April 23, 1990)
“You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.”
—Werner Herzog (b. 1942)