If politics is show business for ugly people, then parliament is the stage on which they shine. And since 2014 – when the first major Hollywood film was shot at the Palace of Westminster – Commons bosses have raised desperately needed funds for the site by charging media crews access to shoot here. Despite fears that such plans risked turning the institution into a ‘theme park’, figures obtained by Mr S show that parliament raised some £223,883 from 106 requests for such filming between January 2014 and November 2020.
Steerpike was intrigued to peruse the records of such requests to find out who exactly has been filming here. Many of the requests are, as expected, political commentators using the Palace of Westminster as a suitably grand backdrop for special coverage such as those by presenters Nick Robinson and Laura Kuenssberg for the BBC in 2018. Documentaries have been shot on subjects from Arthur Balfour and Henry VIII’s court to Spencer Perceval, Dennis Skinner and Rabbi Willy Woolf.
Sadly for SW1’s bean counters, few big budget productions have booked up parliament since Suffragette. The two best known are Disney’s Mary Poppins sequel – featuring Big Ben and building rooftops – and of course, Darkest Hour which starred Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill and incorporated the Commons chamber and Member’s Lobby among others.
Steerpike imagines former Commons speaker John Bercow would have jumped at the offer to feature on the One Show in 2014, with other BBC shows since including Mastermind, Blue Peter and Antiques Roadshow alongside Lucy Worsley’s documentary on the Glorious Revolution and fellow historian Dominic Sandbrook’s effort on Thatcher and the 1980s. Even Strictly Come Dancing got in on the act in 2016, shooting footage with shadow Chancellor turned dancing star Ed Balls, as a nod to his time in politics.
Of even more interest are the three times in which stars of popular reality TV show The Only Way is Essex (TOWIE) filmed on the parliamentary estate. These included Joey Essex appearing with Lord Sandwich in the Commons chamber, fellow cast regular Georgia Toffolo talking about Churchill for ITV’s This Morning and TOWIE itself filming in the thousand year old Westminster Hall back in June 2019.
Preening, fame-hungry egotists acting up for the cameras in Parliament? The MPs must have made them feel right at home.
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