Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
VICTORIA’S SECRETS
Wellies, wig ovens and a coat of arms bought from a pound shop – a fascinating new book reveals what really went on backstage as they filmed ITV’s sumptuous show
From the dresses to the wigs and even the wallpaper, how the team behind TV’s most sumptuous show put it all together
Her big secret is out: underneath Queen Victoria’ s crinolines and the lavish dresses, the satin ball gowns and stately court costumes, she’s wearing... wellies! At least Jenna Coleman was, the actress who plays her in the magnificent eight-part series enthralling millions on Sunday nights. She loved her ‘Queen garb’ ( her phrase) as she paraded regally and pouted like a teenager in her portrayal of Britain’s young monarch 175 years ago, but rubber boots were an essential accoutrement thanks to the mud she had to navigate to get to the set for filming.
This was because the opulent chambers, drawing rooms and staterooms of Buckingham Palace that we see on screen are not the real thing. They were re-created in a vast disused hangar on a former RAF base in the tiny village of Church Fenton in Yorkshire. ‘ The trickiest thing when wearing these fantastic outfits was getting through the mud,’ says Jenna, hence her wellies, while her screen husband Tom Hughes, playing Prince Albert, was grateful for the heavy woollen coats he had to wear for his part because they kept out the cold while waiting around on set.
Initially producer Paul Frift thought of finding a suitable stately home to double up for Buckingham Palace, where much of the action for Victoria is set, but admits that shooting on location in such places can be a problem. With a specially built set, the directors are in complete control as opposed to having to work around the residents of an actual house. The process is inevitably much quicker, and filming of the series there was able to be completed in just 11 weeks.
What they set up in the windy hangar was as authentic as possible. Although there are no records or photographs of the Royal Apartments inside Buckingham Palace in 1837, all the stops were pulled out to ensure the lavish décor recreated for the series was correct for the period down to the last detail. Georgian wallpapers were reproduced and the carpets specially made and printed with a period design. The gold chairs and gilded tables dotted throughout the rooms were made to order and the paintings were either produced by the art team or were prints of originals in the Royal Collection, encased in new frames.
Victoria came to the throne long before electric lighting, and gas lighting had only been installed as an experiment in a few parts of the palace, so the rooms were almost entirely lit by candles. ‘We estimated that we would use 400 a day but ended up using 900 on some days,’ recalls production designer Michael Howells. ‘There were so many, especially in the big ball scenes, that we had to have someone on fire-watch the whole time in case the place went up.’
Incidentally, the storyline that royal servants sold off used candles for extra cash is real. It was a wellknown perk. A shop in Piccadilly actually advertised stumps of wax candles for sale as ‘candle- ends from Buckingham Palace’.
Victoria’s teal blue and silver bedroom in the show is dominated by a huge four-poster bed on a raised platform with sumptuous embroidered drapes. The props team went to a lot of auctions in search of suitable Georgian pieces and found this one in the Czech Republic. The wallpaper was copied from an 1809 design while the luxurious curtains on the windows were run up using cheap silk from China.
Her drawing room is particularly sumptuous, with imposing pillars – actually made from cardboard, rolled into a column and then marbled. As for the impressive royal coat of arms hanging above the door, Michael Howells recalls it was ‘a shield from a child’s suit of armour I bought in a pound shop’.
But what of the clothes, a vital part of any costume drama? Costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt had to dress more than 30 principal members of cast and numerous ladies-in-waiting, downstairs staff, diplomats and politicians, plus hundreds of extras. Some outfits were hired from costumiers but others made from scratch. Get- ting the style details spot- on was a challenge because Victoria’s accession to the throne marked the beginning of a new era in fashion, says
Rosalind. ‘Skirts got bigger and the crinoline frame came in to hold them up and take the weight. It was a really repressive time for women fashionwise. They wore corsets and heavy petticoats, their sleeves were so tight they could hardly move their arms and the veils on the bonnets meant they could hardly see.’
The female cast members found their costumes ‘quite cumbersome but very beautiful’, as one of them put it. They wore corsets under their dresses and a single quilted petticoat rather than layers of them, which was much lighter than the real thing. These had the added attraction of acting like a duvet and keeping them warm when they were filming in the Yorkshire cold.
Victoria herself changes her dress style over the eight episodes, starting as a young queen in childlike dresses with big sleeves, but as she matures into a woman, a wife and a mother, so the waistline goes down and the sleeve shape changes.
For the men, formal dress jackets were military-style and hired from specialists because of the huge cost of making them new. For his wedding scenes, Tom Hughes wore a red field marshal’s jacket with genuine gold epaulettes. But generally the gold embroidery around collars and cuffs was fine wire rather than the real thing, which would have been prohibitively expensive. However it made the clothes very heavy (Tom was grateful that he got ‘ a good workout’ from the effort of wearing them). The arrival of Victoria also ushered in new trends in hair and make- up. Before her reign, styles for women were elaborate and flamboyant, all plaits, braids and buns piled up on top of the head with ringlets cascading down. When she became queen, she went for simplicity, says stylist Nic Collins. All the piled-up hair came down from on top of the head. The new look was a centre parting with dropped buns or plaits at the side.
As the lead, and the most recognisable character, it was crucial that Jenna Coleman looked as close to the real Queen Victoria as possible. Extensions were woven into her shoulder-length hair, so that it could be styled in the buns favoured by the Queen or left loose for the informal scenes in her boudoir. Her make-up was then applied to look as natural as possible, to tie in with the simple unadorned fashion of the period. Unsurprisingly, her stint in the hair and make-up truck each day was the longest of any of the cast, lasting an hour and a quarter. Also in the make-up truck was an unusual item – a wig oven. This was to keep the wigs of the menservants,
‘We ended up using 900 candles a day sometimes’
which cost as much as £4,000 apiece, in shape. The hair was wrapped around wooden rollers and baked in the heated box to set the style.
Though largely filmed in the hangar, there was also some location shooting for the series. Outdoor scenes set at Windsor, either on horseback or in a coach, were filmed among 200 acres of landscaped grounds at Bramham Park near Leeds. Wentworth Woodhouse near Rotherham stood in for the Duke of Cumberland’s house, and its 18th- century stable-yards also became the gr imy Dickensian streets of the East End.
The production has been blessed with perfect casting, shown in the marvellously sensitive and subtle performances from Rufus Sewell and Jenna Coleman as Lord Melbourne and Victoria. Rufus, whose portrayal of Melbourne is one of the most talked-about highlights of the series, sees him as someone who was very practical and accommodating. ‘He just liked the idea of making things work with people. He had a lovely way about him and really liked his fellow man.’ But there was a down side to this because his diffidence and easy-going manner led to criticism. ‘He was described as “the laziest prime minister in the history of Great Britain” because he had a great suspicion of anyone with a deeply fervent belief,’ says Rufus.
Melbourne was a dabbler by nature. Born into wealth and privilege, he entered politics almost by default but found parliament a ‘damned bore’. He was no great believer in political reform or progress. All he wanted to do was drift through life, enjoying the gossip of salon society or lounge about with his feet on the sofa at his favourite clubs. But then he found himself in a position of influence over the inexperi- enced Queen and was drawn to her, as she was to him. He had a fund of stories, which made her laugh. ‘I love most dearly this dear excellent man, who is kindness itself,’ she wrote. Underneath, however, he was a melancholy soul, saddened irreparably by an unhappy marriage. Rufus captures all these nuances brilliantly.
But for all the hard work behind the scenes to get everything looking just right, no film set is of much use unless there’s a good story to tell – and there certainly is here. The fascinating dynamic between Victoria and Melbourne, plus the growing and changing relationship between Albert and Victoria, leaves open the potential for a second series tracing further along Victoria’s gripping life story. Adapted from The Victoria Letters: The Heart And Mind Of A Young Queen by Helen Rappaport and Daisy Goodwin, published by HarperCollins on 6 October, £20. © Helen Rappaport and Daisy Goodwin 2016. To order a copy for £15 (offer valid to 8 October; p&p free), visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. Victoria is on tomorrow at 9pm on ITV.