Filming over the years

Kicking things off with a classic – The Good Old Days! Whilst already possessing a rich history of the world’s greatest entertainers (from Houdini to Chaplin), from 1953 The Varieties ruled the airwaves for 30 years on the BBC, showcasing old-school talent with the record-breaking variety show. Read more about The Good Old Days and producer Barney Colehan.

As the show starred Sir Ken Dodd (alongside the likes of Roy Castle, Bernard Cribbins and Barry Cryer), the auditorium at The Varieties has since been named in his honour to celebrate his legacy and tenure on stage and screen. As plenty of audience members and staff alike can recall, there were countless evenings where ‘Doddy’ would perform late into the night (with many people having to miss their taxis, staying right to the end!). Next time you visit, make sure to look out for the recently-installed Ken Dodd mosaic, too!

Shot in 1989 – starring early dramatic roles for Courteney Cox and Hugh Grant – was Judith Krantz’s Till We Meet Again, based on the book of the same name. The mini-series was produced by Yorkshire Television and later aired on ITV and CBS in the States. Here, The Varieties doubled as an early 19th century theatre in Dijon, France, where Lucy Gutteridge’s Eve falls in love with performer Alain Marais (Maxwell Caulfield), whose posters can be seen plastered across Swan Street. You can also spot how the sign above the old Box Office entrance has been repurposed with the name ‘Theatre Royal’, in the image below.

Jumping forward to the 2010s (via the short-lived Dalziel and Pascoe mini-series, A Pinch of Snuff in 1994), it’s the award-winning Peaky Blinders, another era-defining staple of the BBC – albeit very different in tone and subject matter! The crew behind Tommy Shelby and his Brum brigade filmed plenty up here in Yorkshire, including at City Varieties – which was transformed into everything from a smoky Birmingham cinema (named ‘Penny Crush’) to a grand opera house. Perhaps they took inspiration from over the road… Read more about our starring role in Peaky Blinders here.

In 2015, the feature film Testament of Youth paid us a visit. Starring Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington and Tomb Raider’s Alicia Vikander (pictured here in our iconic red seats!) as well as stalwarts of British indie (Emily Watson, Taron Egerton, Dominic West, Hayley Atwell, Joanna Scanlan), the star-studded production took us back to the early 20th century, adapting Vera Brittain’s First World War memoir.

Thanks to funding from Screen Yorkshire, both productions (amongst others mentioned later in this blog) made great use of locations across Leeds and the surrounding areas.

From one of the minds behind The League of Gentlemen, Jeremy Dyson, came Ghost Stories (2017). The supernatural movie featured Andy Nyman, Martin Freeman and Paul Whitehouse (who also came to LHT for Only Fools and Horses in February 2025). It feels fitting that The Varieties starred as a venue for ghostly performance, given the many stories of hauntings and the phantoms who ward the corridors of our venues. Find out more about the ghosts of LHT here, as told by our staff.

The most recent production to shoot at The Varieties (for now…) was The ABC Murders. Agatha Christie’s classic was adapted for the screen in 2018, with John Malkovich as Poirot and Rupert Grint as Inspector Crome, filmed widely across Yorkshire – including here in Leeds. Watch John Malkovich do his best Poirot as he skulks through the aisles of the Stalls. I wonder if he treated himself to a tub of Northern Bloc ice cream on his break!

Whilst there is no formal record of any movies or television programmes shot at The Grand, there has been an array of filming over the past two decades – capturing the joy of live comedy or the mystery of illusion on stage.

Such live specials include Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow (2010), Harry Hill Live: Sausage Time (2013), Derren Brown: Infamous (2014) and Showman (2022), Mel B: In Conversation (2019), Dick & Angel: Dare to Do It (2022) and Leigh Francis: My First Time (2024).

Thanks to Louis Le Prince inventing the motion picture (with the world’s first films, Roundhay Garden Scene and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, shot in this very city in 1888), Leeds has its place in cinema history firmly secured. Nevertheless, it is a delight for the sights and sounds of Leeds to remain a fixture in productions from around the country, across film, television and beyond.

Despite the varied array of genres, many of these productions have adopted our heritage venues as historic locations and signifiers of the past, embracing and highlighting our buildings’ original features (both internally and externally) to transport viewers through history – often with a bit of movie magic, too.

In many ways, it is an ode to our rich entertainment history and immortalises our venues in celluloid (or digital, at least) for years to come, while our own screens and stages continue to tell stories.