Hebburn on Screen: Film and TV Locations

Most towns on the south bank of the Tyne have never had a prime-time television series named after them. Hebburn has. For two series on BBC Two, a warm-hearted family sitcom carried the town's name into living rooms across the country, and it remains the proudest entry in Hebburn's screen story. Beyond the sitcom, the wider stretch of the Tyne and neighbouring South Tyneside has a long and genuine history on film, from ITV crime drama to the Catherine Cookson adaptations that were set and shot on home ground.

The Hebburn sitcom

The obvious place to start is Hebburn, the BBC Two sitcom created by and starring the Hebburn-born comedian Jason Cook. It followed the Pearson family in the town where Cook grew up, and ran for two series between 2012 and 2013, with a Christmas special to close. The cast was a strong one: Chris Ramsey and Kimberley Nixon as newlyweds Jack and Sarah, Gina McKee as mother Pauline, and Jim Moir, better known as Vic Reeves, as father Joe.

Here it is worth being honest about the difference between where a programme is set and where it is filmed. The sitcom was unmistakably set in Hebburn, and it did shoot on location in the town: principal photography opened with a week's filming here in April 2012, with Park Road, the street where Cook was raised, prominently featured, and exterior pub scenes shot at a local pub. But the bulk of the series, including the interiors, was made at studios in Manchester after that opening week. So while Hebburn genuinely appears on screen, it is fair to say the show was largely produced in Manchester rather than filmed street-by-street on Tyneside. That does not diminish the connection. Few places of Hebburn's size can say a national comedy took their name and put their streets, however briefly, in front of millions.

Best for: The sitcom's affection for the town is real. Jason Cook has spoken often about wanting to show an ordinary North East community as warm and funny rather than grim, and the series is remembered locally with pride.

The wider Tyne on screen

Step beyond the town boundary and the screen credits multiply. South Tyneside and the neighbouring riverside have become a favourite of location scouts, valued for a maritime and industrial character that no studio set can fake.

South Shields, a short hop from Hebburn on the Metro, appears regularly in the long-running ITV crime drama Vera. The series has filmed extensively across the North East, and South Shields landmarks such as the Town Hall, the seafront and the beaches have all featured, with the town's blend of harbour heritage and urban grit standing in for the moody backdrops the show is known for. North Shields, across the water, has been used in the same way.

Longer ago, the riverside around the Tyne played host to the Catherine Cookson television adaptations. Cookson, born in Tyne Dock in nearby South Shields, set her novels in the hard-working Tyneside of the past, and the mini-series drawn from them, running from The Fifteen Streets in 1989 through to A Dinner of Herbs in 2001, were both set and filmed in the region. For once, setting and location matched: these were North East stories told on North East ground.

A region that plays itself

What ties all of this together is authenticity. The North East is rarely asked to pretend to be somewhere else. Instead, its shipyards, seafronts and terraced streets are cast as themselves, or as the honest working communities that Cookson, and later Cook, wanted to portray. Hebburn's own moment in that story is modest but real: a national sitcom that chose the town not for its glamour but for its ordinariness, and made that the whole point.

If you want to see where much of local life still happens, Hebburn Central is the modern hub, home to the library, pools and community events. And if the region's screen history has caught your interest, the connections run right up the coast. Alnwick Castle has doubled as Hogwarts and Downton Abbey's Brancaster Castle in our Alnwick on screen guide, while Durham Cathedral has stood in for Hogwarts and Asgard in the Durham on screen guide.

Best for: Filming for productions like Vera is not usually open to the public while cameras are rolling, but many of the locations, from the South Shields seafront to the Tyne riverside, are free to visit any day of the year.