FOLLOWING its use as a location in the recent ITV television production of Wuthering Heights, Oakwell Hall in Birstall is again being used for the filming of a star-studded period drama.
The BBC2 production The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister is to be filmed there in the next few weeks.
Maxine Peake, star of Shameless and Criminal Justice, takes the lead role and she is joined by Dean Lennox Lewis who played her on-screen husba
nd in Shameless.
Also appearing will be Anna Madeley from Sense and Sensibility, Susan Lynch, from Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Christine Bottomley, from Land Girls and Hope Springs, Spooks star Gemma Jones and Tina O'Brien from Coronation Street.
It means the museum will be closed to the public on Friday, November 27 and also from Sunday, November 29 to Friday, December 4. The country park will remain open to visitors.
The drama features the colourful life of Anne Lister, who owned Shibden Hall in Halifax. Filming is taking place at Shibden Hall as well as at Oakwell.
However, the size of Shibden's rooms and building lay-out makes filming some of the internal scenes technically difficult and so the production team, some of whom were involved in Wuthering Heights, are using Oakwell Hall, which is of a similar period, for those scenes.
The drama is based on the diaries of Anne Lister who was born in 1791. The diaries, containing up to around four million words, with a large section written in code, detail her life and love affairs with various women.
The 90-minute drama, being made by Oxford Film and Television, is expected to be broadcast in the spring.
It will be accompanied by a one-hour documentary, presented by Sue Perkins, which will tell the story of Anne Lister, the decoding of her diaries and the role of Halifax during the Industrial Revolution.
