Travel Tips

The Royal is one of my favourite television shows. For those who do not know it The Royal is a fictional hospital in the fictional town of Elsonbey in Yorkshire. The weekly series is comedy drama and features stories each week on the staff and patients.
Interior filming is done in Bradford but the exterior shots are a block of flats on Holbeck Road in Scarborough that become The Royal whenever outdoor scenes are needed. Occasionally Scarborough is used for some scenes as well but as the series is set in the late 1960s finding suitable venues must be difficult.
Quite by chance we found the Yorkshire TV people filming part of an episode to be shown late in 2007 one morning in August 2007 as we passed. I was surprised how close I could get to the actors and I even got a stare from the director as my camera clicked during a shoot. The photo shows the production team and one of the actors.
Add - this episode was shown on the UKs ITV network on July 20th, 2008 - nearly a year after it was filmed.

Here is the one scene we saw filmed under way. Two sound men and two cameras recorded the action.

This will be a scene in a forthcoming episode and you are seeing it here on VT many months before it will be screened. The story line is that receptionist Lizzie comes running out of the hospital to look for her boss Mr Carnegie when she finds a hippy sat on the wall. Well it is supposed to be 1967!

It took three attempts to get the scene right and as soon as the producer agreed the scene was finished the actress who plays Lizzie ran to the mixing desk to see the rushes.

Lizzie and a nurse who must be new to the next series take a break between filming.

Kenny used to be a male nurse but was demoted a few series back to be an ambulance driver for an indiscretion with a female nurse. The ambulance he drives is a real 1960s ambulance - just air and gas in the back and a wooden bed. No fast action paramedics in fully equipped ambulances as in 2007 back in 1967 although as Kenny shows - they had a nice uniform.