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.
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