Slice of the movie action for our parks

Susan Williams wants to put Oldham on the big screen again. As film liaison officer for Greater Manchester , she has already helped the disused Robert Fletcher factory in Greenfield to double as interiors in Afghanistan.

Now her mission is to get Oldham’s award winning parks to star in future productions. Janice Barker talked to her about her behind the scenes role.

Life is location, location, location for Chadderton media production graduate Susan Williams.

She spent 10 years in London training in film production, writing books and scripts for children’s BBC and industry newsletters.

But when she hankered for her home town, she found the perfect job just down the road in Manchester, helping film makers to find the perfect locations for their TV and big screen recordings.

At the Greater Manchester office of Northwest Vision and Media she works on behalf of the digital and creative industries in the region.

Now she arranges requests to film anything from a cow walking down a main street in Manchester city centre, a Victorian toilet, a terraced street and an empty cotton mill.

The North-West already has the largest and most profitable film and TV industry outside London, contributing over 11 per cent of network programming every year.

The Greater Manchester Film Office was established in 2002 to support the fastest growing sub-region for TV production. Last year there were 970 filming days, generating an estimated £21,340,000 in inward investment for Greater Manchester.

Recent examples of programme scenes filmed specifically in Oldham include the BBC’s “Waterloo Road”, “The Street”, “Survivors”, and “Sunshine”, and ITV’s “Boy Meets Girl”.

And Manchester was also used recently as the backdrop for Guy Ritchie’s latest film “Sherlock Holmes” starring Jude Law and Robert Downie Jnr.

The logistics included getting three carriages with eight horses into Albert Square — and then cleaning up the horse muck afterwards.

The office has a register of film locations — which anyone can add to via the website — and helps film makers by liaising with police, local councils, highway and utility companies, and senior managers in private companies by getting proper clearances to begin shooting.

Susan, who has been in her job for six years, said: “I suppose this office is the busiest because we have the BBC and Granada here, many independent productions companies and production crews.

“This is known as a very film friendly region, and we do get officers from the councils suggesting locations to us.

“We also have the locations register, which has everything from mills, offices and homes. It is not just for posh houses, just regular family houses.

“One of the things we always get asked for are terraced streets. People do ring us up and ask for ‘Coronation Street’, and we have to tell them it is not a real place, it is a Granada set.

“We know Oldham is rich with lots of diverse locations, not just the moors. We have requests for quite a lot of mills, derelict or not, or available floors. We can’t have too many Victorian mills.

“I’m always on the look out for good locations, and I’ll see something and put it to the back of my mind for later.”

With her colleague Bobby Cochrane, assistant film liaison officer, she is trying to get more local football grounds signed up, and would like to see Oldham Athletic on the register.

And she added: “I must get our lovely parks, like Alexandra, Werneth and Chadderton Hall, on the register.”

Susan’s office also helped find locations well known to TV viewers, such as the Rochdale school which is the permanent set for “Waterloo Road,” and the mill in Paul Abbott’s award winning TV series “Clocking Off,’ which was the Ace Mill in Whitegate Lane, Chadderton.

And watch out for the view of hills from Chadderton and Royton towards Rochdale and the Scout Moor wind farm when Martin Freeman stars in “Boy Meets Girl”.

The empty and rather spooky former Robert Fletcher paper factory recently posed as interiors of Afghan buildings for a film still in production, and many of the scenes of the 1970s period police classic “Life on Mars” were filmed around Manchester, Trafford and Salford.

And what keeps creative film makers coming back to the region?

Susan’s opinion is: “It’s the incredible talent, both in front and behind the camera, that continues to be the driving force in attracting significant quality dramas to Greater Manchester. “

Anyone interested in registering their home, office or any other property can contact the website www.visionandmedia.co.uk