Why Bradford? Why not? Aside from the huge work that the bid team put in to secure the City of Film title from UNESCO, and the programme of events, both immediate and long-term, which is being unveiled this week, Bradford has a long and illustrious history of film-making.

In fact, movies have been made in Bradford for longer than they’ve been made in Hollywood.

Very early silent movies were first shown in Bradford in 1897… and Hollywood didn’t begin making films until 1910.

The man they called The First Knight of the Camera, Bradfordian Richard James Appleton, filmed a parade in London to commemorate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. The film was later shown in Bradford city centre to an aghast audience.

In between, technicians had worked on Appleton’s unprocessed film in an ad-hoc dark room set up on the train from the capital to Forster Square station.

Not long after that, the cameras rolled in Bradford on an amazing series of adventure movies starring Captain Kettle, which were filmed in a primitive studio on Manchester Road, which became the home of Pyramid Film Studios.

Once the age of cinema dawned properly in the 1920s, Bradford’s place in cinematic history was assured. Just take a look at this (not exhaustive) list of films that have been shot in the district: Room At The Top (1958), Billy Liar (1962), Life At The Top (1965), The Railway Children (1970), The Water Babies (1976), Yanks (1979), The Dresser (1983), Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life (1983), A Private Function (1984), Rita, Sue And Bob Too (1986), Testimony (1988), Wuthering Heights (1920 and 1992), Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997), LA Without A Map (1998), Calendar Girls (2003).

And that isn’t counting the TV shows that have been made here, from Emmerdale to more recent hits such as Spooks: Code 9 and Red Riding.

The Bradford district can claim at least three Oscar-winners: Bradford-born director James Hill, who got an Academy Award in 1963 for his short film Giuseppina; Shipley-born director Tony Richardson, for Tom Jones, also in 1963; and Keighley-born screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, for Slumdog Millionaire, last year.