As a child, I never realised how unusual it was to get home from school and find a camera crew in your living room. Until I was 10 years old, our village, Esholt in Bradford, was where the ITV soap Emmerdale was filmed. In the 90s, my parents’ house was one of the main locations. Using real homes was not unusual for a soap at the time, especially when episodes aired only once or twice a week, and it would certainly have been cheaper to pay residents than to build a whole village back then.
Most days, our kitchen or living room would be full of cables and lights, with the characters from the show wandering around. As children, our job was to be quiet, so we’d usually go and play outside. If we were ever in our bedrooms while they were filming downstairs, we couldn’t walk around because the floorboards might creak.
In the mid-1990s, producers needed to introduce a vets’ surgery and spotted the potential of an empty barn adjoining our house. Part of the barn was turned into the vets’, which was amazing because we could take our stuffed animals in there, give them pretend operations and feed them the pretend medicine that was stocked on the shelves.
Even better, the rest of the barn was turned into a new, much bigger living room. This was something my parents had previously applied for planning permission for but which had been declined. When the production company requested planning permission it went through, and the barn was tastefully renovated using quite expensive furniture, which we still have. But the best thing for the kids in the village was that there used to be drinks and snacks carts everywhere. We would wait until the crew weren’t watching and nick biscuits.
None of this felt strange to us because everybody in Esholt was involved to some extent. There would be times, for example, that you couldn’t go into the village hall or the park because they were being used for filming; but otherwise it was, and still is, a real village. My younger sister Sophie has worked in the Woolpack pub and my mum Sally still works in the post office.
Perhaps the most memorable Emmerdale storyline involved a plane crash. They brought the power lines down in the village, and there was rubble everywhere, like a disaster movie. The windows of our house were blown out – it was so dramatic.
Sometimes we’d watch the scenes being filmed, and were occasionally asked to be extras. Once, the director offered my mum a speaking part: she had to walk up to a food truck and say, “Two 99s, please.” My mum was really excited, but when it came to the filming, the words wouldn’t come out. It took quite a few takes. They never asked her to say a line again.
The entire cast and crew were lovely. Nobody was rude or unfriendly; they were all nice people who cared about our family and became close friends. When my sister was born, the day my parents brought her home, the crew were filming in our house. The director told my mum that if she needed some space they could all clear out, but she assured them she was fine. But suddenly it got so overwhelming that she went upstairs and broke down in tears. After a while, she noticed it had gone silent downstairs. She realised the crew had quietly packed up and left for the day. The baby monitor was on and they’d overheard her crying.
Because the show was so popular, tourists were another fixture of my childhood. When my parents were out, we would charge them a fiver for my older brother Steven to give them a little tour. It was extra pocket money for us. Eventually, my parents found out – I’m pretty sure the woman down the road shopped us.
I think that was the kind of thing that brought filming in the village to an end. It became difficult for the producers because onlookers would constantly interrupt the filming.
Now, Emmerdale is filmed at a custom-built set, which is a close-ish replica of Esholt. Seeing the village on TV feels a bit like a dream – it looks similar, but not quite the same. Recently, we were invited to look round the studio. My mum and I were standing in the set saying to the other people on the tour, “This is our living room!” They all thought we were crazy.
As told to Robyn Vinter
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