Actor of the moment James Nelson-Joyce has been applauding the portrayal of his home town of Liverpool in This City Is Ours. 

“Of course it shows the dark side, but also the most gorgeous Georgian architecture, the river, the parks, some of the beautiful restaurants we’ve got,” he told the Radio Times.

He is correct. With the right lighting and a generous squint, Liverpool’s wide-open streets and glittering frontage can call to mind Michael Mann’s LA in Heat. 

Diana and Michael in This City Is Ours (Image: BBC/Leftbank Pictures/James Stack)

In an unofficial league table of the most-filmed cities in the UK, Liverpool is behind top-dog London and above Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

I thought Glasgow would be top. It has been hard to swing a boom mic around here recently without hitting a location scout. As the city council often tells us, it pays well to bring programmes and films here. According to one estimate, productions have brought around £500 million to the city’s economy over the past 25 years. 

Well worth a few street closures, then, unless you are trying to get somewhere. Filming has at times rivalled protest marches and roadworks as the Glasgow motorist’s bugbear. Others love the buzz that the circus brings to town. When Spider-Man was here, the faces of children in the watching crowds were a picture in themselves.  All those Spider-Man pyjamas, and that was just the dads.

I was once one of those youngsters. Come with me back to an unspecified date in time and an episode of Minder. A young Peter Capaldi was playing a character........

© Herald Scotland