None of it felt strange, because everybody in the village was involved with Emmerdale to some extent
As a child, I never realised how unusual it was to get home from school and find a camera crew in your living room. Until I was 10 years old, our village, Esholt in Bradford, was where the ITV soap Emmerdale was filmed. In the 90s, my parents’ house was one of the main locations. Using real homes was not unusual for a soap at the time, especially when episodes aired only once or twice a week, and it would certainly have been cheaper to pay residents than to build a whole village back then.
Most days, our kitchen or living room would be full of cables and lights, with the characters from the show wandering around. As children, our job was to be quiet, so we’d usually go and play outside. If we were ever in our bedrooms while they were filming downstairs, we couldn’t walk around because the floorboards might creak.
