News: ITV’s Young Vic

A national broadcaster is filming an ambitious eight-part drama following the early life of Queen Victoria. The series follows the monarch from her accession to the throne aged 18, through to her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert.

Jenna Coleman, best known for her starring role in Dr Who, takes the part of Victoria. The early episodes explore the queen’s relationship with the raffish Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne (played by Rufus Sewell). Their close relationship became a popular source of gossip that threatened to destabilise the Government.

It is the first drama to be filmed in the newly opened Yorkshire Studios. Exterior locations include the grand 18th century stately home, Castle Howard and the minster school yard in York. The series will air later this year on ITV, opening with a 90-minute special and followed by seven one-hour episodes. Based on the diaries Victoria kept as a teenager, according to producers it will ‘explore the scandal, corruption and romantic intrigue, involving everyone from the humblest dresser to the Mistress of the Robes, the lowliest bootboy to the Lord Chamberlain’. ITV are hoping that it will be the popular successor to Downton Abbey.

See our Blue Badge guided tour of York.