The Beatles aren’t Scouse. Littlewoods is in limbo. What’s going on with Liverpool film and telly?

With apologies to Gore Vidal, the three most dispiriting words in the English language are in fact “new crime drama”. Just a cursory scan over BBC iPlayer’s oblations reveals more bizzies than you could shake an IOPC complaint at: Death in Paradise, This City is Ours, Dope Girls, Time, Line of Duty, The Responder, Happy Valley, Peaky Blinders, the list goes on. Gone are the days when Auntie would schedule genreless, mind-melting shows; if Dennis Potter were alive today, he’d be chained to a basement in Broadcasting House, script-editing Shetland at gunpoint.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed half of those programmes are either set or filmed in Liverpool; some of them are even watchable. Were the sun a little sunnier, the spring birdsong a little sweeter, the bees just a trifle buzzier, it would be tempting to burnish these offerings into a kind of Scouse film and televisual renaissance. But is this the case?

Our fair city is said to be the second-most filmed region in the country, versatile enough to drag up as 1920s Birmingham, 1930s Berlin, 1940s New York, 1960s Washington DC, 1970s Belfast, 1980s London, or even a contemporary Gotham City. (The 1950s must be cordoned-off Terence Davies territory.) No fewer than four Beatles movies are now in the works, all to be directed by British film establishment darling Sam Mendes. Sons and daughters of the city such as Stephen Graham and Jodie Comer are in high demand in Hollywood — indeed, Graham's record-breaking Adolescence on Netflix is almost state-mandated viewing. Over on ITV, G’wed has been renewed for series two and three. And even if you share my sense that television has declined from a surrealistic golden age of Potter, John Bowen, Nigel Kneale, Robert Holmes and David Rudkin into a grotty swirl around the kitchen sinkhole, to deny the talents of Time creator Jimmy McGovern or Responder virtuoso Tony Schumacher would be pathological.

A new star in this murky firmament has recently been announced: The Cage, also written by Schumacher. While This City is Ours could’ve been set anywhere, really, The Responder nailed the Scouse syntax, weaving a geographically unique patter into its dramatic intensity. The Cage may well capture your attention — even if one feels obliged to spare a thought for the Liverpool City Region’s (LCR) tourist board as the city is once again portrayed as a crime-riddled shit-tip. 

And yet. While it can be gratifying to click and whistle at the screen Rick Dalton-style when some recognisable landmark appears (usually, for some reason, Exchange Flags), Liverpool’s telegenic status has more to do with the city’s architectural heritage and the relatively prohibitive cost of filming in London or New York than tapping any fresh creative artery. None of Mendes’ Beatles will be played by Merseyside actors – a casting announcement that incited peals of proprietorial outrage by Scousers across the internet. Nor will The Cage grant top billing to local performers, with the BBC opting for Michael Socha and Sheridan Smith.

Okay, the viperine Waltonite James Nelson-Joyce did play the protagonist of This City is Ours – so successfully that he is now apparently in the running for 007. But his colleagues Diana Onslow, Julie Graham, Laura Aikman, and Saoirse-Monica Jackson all had to affect Scouse accents. And top billing went to bankable Yorkshireman and former Bond adversary Sean Bean – also, incidentally, the star of McGovern’s Time and Broken. I’m not complaining – I meet any onscreen appearance of Bean with a pleasure that would make Joely Richardson blush – but are there really no sexy sixty-something bits-of-rough in suits from this city that could play a traumatised priest or louche gangster? (I nominate Paul McGann and Louis Emerick.) 

In all fairness, the main problem with Sheridan Smith’s previous outing as a Liverpudlian was that she sings far better than “our Cilla” ever did, and Martin Freeman’s masquerade in The Responder was as close to the local diction an outsider has managed since Bernard Hill last uttered the syllable “giz”. (That’s a hard “g”, I hasten to add for those too young to have seen Boys from the Blackstuff.) As a Plazzy myself, it is not my place to lead a campaign against scouseface. But this reticence to take a risk on Liverpool actors makes the success of Graham and Comer look rather isolated, exceptions that prove the rule. Perhaps the young stars of G’wed can buck this trend and land plumb future roles with casting agents. (Likely those who have never seen G’wed.)

Perhaps complaining about a dearth of Merseyside actors working on Liverpool-set drama is “insular”, as one of my anonymous interviewees — an executive producer of several 90s movies — tells me. But with a relatively strong theatrical scene in Liverpool, one might expect more permeation.

In January last year, financial figures from the Everyman/Playhouse suggested audience numbers for 2023 were up 57%, a healthy recovery from COVID. In 2024, the Playhouse debuted fresh, innovative drama, such as Tell Me How It Ends by Tasha Dowd and The Legend of Ned Ludd by Joe Ward Munrow. Then earlier this year, the Royal Court bucked a general trend by reporting another annual rise in audience numbers and a revenue surge – vindication for its model of balancing the risk of staging young local talent such as Cosmic by Joe McNally and Offered Up by Joe Matthew-Morris — it’s helpful to be named “Joe” if you want a play produced in Liverpool — with populist crowd-pleasers like Pharoah ‘Cross the Mersey or Hitchhiker's Guide To Fazakerley. The Court’s stage adaptation of Boys From the Blackstuff was a West End-touring smash. Add to that the popular and once endangered Epstein reopening, a pristine executive leadership team at the Unity, and brand new smaller venues opening on Hope and Wood Street, and we could be in for a rosy next few years in the performing arts.

“The great thing about [the Liverpool theatre scene] is that it’s much more democratic than in other cities,” Joe Ward Munrow tells me over a pint in the Hope Street Arts Bar opposite the Everyman itself. He’s just won the inaugural Robert Holman Grant Award, set up to assist northern playwrights. Before that, he taught on the Everyman/Playhouse’s young writers’ programme after winning it himself. Originally from Deptford in south-east London, Ward Munrow tells me how he’s not sure whether the capital’s infrastructure could’ve developed a working-class talent like his in the same way. 

While theatre should not be seen either by performers or punters as a pipeline to screen stardom, I can’t help but wonder what Ward Munrow – whose Ned Ludd is an experimental, Oulipo-esque piece where no two (or 256) performances are the same – could cook up for telly if given the chance. In any case, a thriving dramatic scene can help cultivate a healthy ecology for actors, writers, and technicians alike. According to Roger Shannon, a film industry professional for 40 years, “a heyday” for Liverpool performers was when a group of institutions in the city such as the Everyman, the Playhouse, Liverpool Film Office, emerging film companies supported by Channel 4's influential Film on 4, and weekly television soap Brookside were all interlinked in a sort of creative pipe line for the screen industries.

The point about Brookie interests me. The Mersey Television-produced drama, which ran from 1982 to 2003, didn’t just develop McGovern as a screenwriter but also Joe Ainsworth, Roy Boulter, and Frank Cottrell-Boyce. With all due respect to McGovern’s Moving On, the occasionally brilliant anthology series developed in Liverpool by LA Productions, I’m not sure anything has quite replaced it when it comes to unearthing and nurturing Merseyside talent.

With funding derived from European Regional Development Fund, Shannon set up the Merseyside Film Production Fund at the Moving Image Development Agency, and ran it from from 1992 to 1997. He was also MIDA's executive producer for Butterfly Kiss, Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s (and director Michael Winterbottom’s) big screen indie film début. Boulter co-founded Hurricane Films – alongside LA, another estimable production company in the city – which fought tooth and nail to finance three films by Terence Davies. (And while talking to Shannon, it occurs to me that Liverpool’s reluctance to embrace its greatest cinematic genius is partly because Davies’ films never fit into the “kitchen sink crime drama with craic” genre the BBC and the Liverpool Film Office are apparently determined to cram the city’s self-image into.) Their next project — directed by Boulter — will be an adaptation of Liverpool performance poet Roy’s book Algorithm Party.

This is what I mean by an ecology. But while none of these names nor their achievements should be downplayed, most are of an earlier generation. Would Liverpool’s theatre, television, and film system recognise a young McGovern or Cottrell-Boyce today? Is there, in fact, even a system for doing so? In the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, studios like MGM or Paramount carefully cultivated and developed talent. For all the problems of that star-driven approach, which often tied actors to onerous contracts and treated writers and directors like scum, perhaps something could be gained from a similarly integrated model.

Of course, nobody expects Liverpool to be Hollywood. But then again, according to metro mayor Steve Rotheram, maybe we should. After all, the LCR has committed £17 million into turning the iconic Littlewoods Pools building into screening and performance spaces, sound stages, and no fewer than four studios, a project that’s been ongoing since property developer Capital & Centric (C&C) acquired the lease in 2017. A fire the following year didn’t help matters, but each subsequent update seems to be just a restatement of the original intent.

The Post reported last year that after all the frustrations and delays, the dream of C&C turning Liverpool into “the Hollywood of the north” (or even “the Pinewood”) was probably a pipe one. I ask LCR whether Littlewoods’ proposed 2027 opening is still on track and, despite its multimillion-pound investment, a spokesperson tells me that the authority has no oversight over the project and directed me to the city council. 

When reached for comment, a council spokesperson said that phase one has been completed and now "the focus is on the marketing of the site for potential tenancies", working with public and private funders as well as C&C to bring the project forward; they expect to provide an update later this year. 

I also reached out to C&C, who also said they have “completed the remedial works on time and on budget” and are now “working towards being back on site by the end of year”, with the project expected to take a further two years. To this end, the property developers say they are working in partnership with LCC and LCR. (Which, judging by their statement, may come as a surprise to the latter.)

Competition to be the Northern Pinewood is feverish. Manchester has MediaCity; Birmingham has Digbeth Loc, set up by Peaky Blinders impresario Stephen Knight; Glasgow’s £28 million Halon Entertainment, a local producer tells me, will be the sixth studio in the city. Sunderland will have the £450 million Crown Works Studios, the beneficiary of far more central government interest than Littlewoods. Belfast currently has eight studios, several – like Crown Works – larger than any planned in Liverpool. 

“There’s been an arms race in the last number of years, and increasingly after COVID, to host a film studio in almost every city in the country,” Shannon says. But even if a film studio in Liverpool does not come to fruition, he says the city will still have two out of the three most important elements for a regional film industry and culture: a successful film office and a strategically targeted film and TV fund. “For example, Sheffield doesn't yet have a film studio,” he points out, but the prolific Warp Films still managed to be a leading creative production company behind Adolescence.

Many of the aforementioned projects – Time, G’wed, This City is Ours – are beneficiaries of public funding, via the Liverpool Film Office (LFO). In contrast to my nitpicking, I get the impression Shannon thinks LFO is doing a sterling job. Clearly, so does Letter to Brezhnev director Chris Bernard, who has produced a brilliant highlight reel to commemorate 35 years of the LFO. I do not attribute this to another outbreak of “Scouse exceptionalism” – the highly contagious psychological condition that hijacks the victims’ brain into celebrating mediocrity as further proof of Liverpool’s greatness – but a sincere gratitude that the city is continually able to punch above its weight when it comes to attracting televisual and cinematic artists.

But perhaps I – a humble scribbler, whose involvement in filmmaking is far more modest than the names above – may offer a complementary if not contradictory vision. Imagine a film office, production fund, and whatever brand-spanking new studios C&C eventually set up in the Art Deco cathedral on Edge Lane, integrated with the city’s stage and performing arts scene more generally, coordinated with LIPA and other educational institutions, and working in conjunction with LA Productions and Hurricane. For want of a term that doesn’t sound like a hepatic disease, let’s call this fluid network of creatives and enablers “Liverwood.”

Liverwood would develop, cross-promote, and channel actors, writers, directors, sound designers, and other technicians in a coordinated and coherent way, with long-term goals based on both artistic and commercial benefit. Liverwood would also seek to bring some kind of parity between programmes that present Liverpool as a northern Mogadishu and those projects with more off-piste artistic ideals, whether they be chaotic reimaginings of Jacobean tragedy or the kind of transcendental style and esoteric interrogation that has seen Davies lauded across the world. Most importantly, Liverwood would demand the BBC put more sexy Merseyside talents both on and behind screen. Even if Sean Bean must co-star.

The best thing about Liverwood? It would give something for more radical artists to rebel against.