Written by new-contact on May 18, 2015. Posted in On Location

TV drama on young Queen Victoria to film on location in UK

A new TV drama focussing on the life of 18-year-old Queen Victoria will be filmed for ITV on location in the UK. The life of Queen Victoria and her relationship with Prince Albert was previously made into feature The Young Victoria in 2009.

Victoria became Queen in 1837 at just 18 and ruled for 63 years until her death in 1901. The new, eight-hour TV drama will be based on the diaries Victoria kept as a teenager.

“Queen Victoria's court is the perfect setting for an epic drama - a seething hotbed of scandal, corruption and romantic intrigue, involving everyone from the humblest dresser to the Mistress of the Robes, the lowliest bootboy to the Lord Chamberlain,” said Damien Timmer of production company Mammoth Screen.

“When we join Victoria in 1837, England is unrecognisable from the country it will become by the end of her reign. As she takes her fledgling steps as monarch we slowly see modern Britain emerge.”

“Victoria was the first woman to have it all,” added novelist-turned-screenwriter Daisy Goodwin: “She had a passionate marriage, nine children and was grandmother to most of Europe's royalty, but she also had a job, being Queen of the most important nation in the world.

“It wasn't easy; her reign was beset by scandal and sleaze and it was only by sheer force of personality that she prevailed. Her diaries, all sixty two million words of them, give an astonishingly vivid picture of her transformation from rebellious teenager into, to my mind, our greatest Queen.”

The new drama will be the latest British period drama to be filmed in the UK, following the success of shows like Wolf Hall and Poldark, which was also produced by Mammoth Screen.