Ready, set, go

Boasting some of Britain's most historic and elegant towns to boot, Dorset's status as the quintessential English county has endured with productions that often bring out the very best in the region.

As Hardy's imaginary Wessex mirrored much of Dorset, it is fitting that the 1967 adaptation of Far From The Madding Crowd remains the gold standard for fans of local film-making.

The landscape was to be as much the star of the movie as Julie Christie and Terence Stamp. As the three suitors vie for the heart of Bathsheba Everdene, Dorset was shown in all its glory in no fewer than 20 locations.

The grand Victorian folly of Horton Tower, between Verwood and Wimborne, was the location for the brutal cock-fighting scene; Shaftesbury's famous Gold Hill stood in for Casterbridge; and Maiden Castle hosted the swordfight between Christie and Stamp.

Another adaptation of one of Hardy's novels, The Woodlanders, which starred Rufus Sewell, was partly shot on the Breamore Estate near Fordingbridge. Jane Austen's Emma starred the up-and-coming Gwyneth Paltrow and Muriel's Wedding star Toni Collette, and featured the village of Evershot, transformed into a nineteenth century Georgian settlement.

The area's spectacular man-made landmarks have also made an impression, especially when a touch of class was needed.

Breamore House, near Fordingbridg,e provided the ideal setting for Anthony Trollope's The Barchester Chronicles. Athelhampton House, near Puddletown, hosted both Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine for the psychological thriller Sleuth in 1972, although much of the action of the film took place in recreated sets at Pinewood Studios rather than in the house itself.

Albert Finney not only starred in the 1963 Oscar-winning Tom Jones, which had a stag-hunt scene filmed at Cerne Abbas and Cranborne House standing in as Tom's stately pile, but returned more than 20 years later to Milton Abbas and Sherborne schools to star as a weary schoolmaster in The Browning Version.

But it is not only the area's classic buildings that provided interest. Stanley Kubrick, deciding on a change of pace after withdrawing the controversial A Clockwork Orange in 1974, chose the Italian Gardens at Compton Acres for the backdrop of historical drama Barry Lyndon.

Meanwhile, the striking image of Meryl Streep walking out to the edge of the famous Cobb in Lyme Regis in the 1981 adaptation of The French Lieutenant's Woman eventually eclipsed the rest of the movie.

However, Dorset's days as a spectacular backdrop might just be numbered. The growth of our towns and roads meant the 1995 adaptation of Jude lost out to the north of England and Scotland because of the lack of wide-open locations - blamed by the director on the overdeveloped countryside.

Meanwhile, The Claim, a recent adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, completely ignores the Dorset setting in favour of Gold Rush California.

According to Sarah Eastel, of Wessex Film and Media Office, an agency that promotes the local area directly to film and the media, this is more down to budgetary concerns than a perceived decline in the area.

"The locations are there, and they're amazing. It's down to how far a cast and crew can travel outside the M25, which is usually down to budget and costs rather than the location. But Dorset is still very popular."

Luckily the area still provides the muse for maverick director Ken Russell, ever since he settled in the New Forest. Bournemouth's Russell-Coates museum was used for a 1976 biography of Rudolph Valentino starring Rudolf Nureyev, while Russell - true to form - upset the residents of Worth Matravers in 1993 when he drew a graphic representation of manhood on a church wall.

There have even been plenty of less-than-strictly historical uses for the local area. Poole Quay and New Quay Road might not remind you of a Norwegian town but that is precisely what they were decked out to look like in the 1965 Kirk Douglas thriller The Heroes of Telemark.

Decorated with Nazi flags, machine-gun posts and barbed wire, El Cid director Anthony Mann made a convincing attempt to give a Scandinavian flavour to the area - although the RNLI boathouse was still easily recognisable in the movie. Co-star Richard Harris also kept up the habit of a lifetime and soon adopted the Jolly Sailor as his watering hole, making frequent trips to the pub during the filming with superstar Douglas in tow.

Specially-shot footage of Poole Harbour also featured in Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn's Oscar-winning movie The African Queen, with the harbour remarkably doubling for African waterways. But, alas, neither Humph nor Hepburn came to the town, with the footage being shot by a small second unit.

Possibly the most remarkable filming decision was made for Comrades, a 1985 film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs that did not actually use the village that gave the first trade unionists their name. Instead the film crew rebuilt the ghost village of Tyneham - abandoned since World War II when troops used the village for D-Day battle training - to recreate Tolpuddle. After shooting additional scenes in Dorchester, the production followed in the martyrs' footsteps by finishing the shoot in Australia.

But even if Dorset's cinematic fortune declines, the county is as popular as ever with TV. Once again both Thomas Hardy and actor Alan Bates were to have a pivotal role in Dorset's finest television moment. The acclaimed 1977 production of The Mayor Of Casterbridge was the ideal counterpart to Far From The Madding Crowd, boasting fine performances from Bates as Michael Henchard and Anne Stallybrass as the wife who returns to haunt him 18 years after he sells her at a fair.