Monty Python and Film Locations in Walton-on-Thames

Walton’s on-screen history did not end when the old film studio closed in 1961. The town has kept turning up in front of cameras ever since, from one of British comedy’s most influential shows to a cult horror film and a run of more recent television series.

Why Walton

Walton’s screen connections are not really a coincidence. A town that spent over sixty years as home to a major film studio, and that sits close to the much larger Shepperton Studios, was always going to remain on location scouts’ radar long after Walton’s own studio closed. The riverside, the town centre and the surrounding streets have offered exactly the kind of ordinary-England backdrop that productions have returned to again and again.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Monty Python filmed on location in Walton in July 1969, during the making of the first series of their groundbreaking sketch show. One of the more memorable results was a scene of Michael Palin rowing on the Thames, filmed at Cowey Sale, Walton’s riverside meadow. It is a small but genuine credit for a show that changed the shape of British comedy, and it places Walton’s river directly inside one of the most influential pieces of British television ever made.

Psychomania

Walton’s town centre had its most substantial screen role in 1973, in the cult horror film Psychomania. Location filming took place around Walton, including scenes shot on Hepworth Way, a street named, appropriately enough, after the town’s old film studio, and at the Walton shopping centre itself. For a film about a motorcycle gang who return from the dead, the choice of an ordinary Surrey shopping parade as a backdrop gives it a distinctly British, slightly incongruous flavour that has helped the film keep its cult following.

Television since

Walton and its immediate surroundings have continued to appear on screen well into the twenty-first century. The ITV sitcom Is It Legal? was shot in the town, and series eight of the BBC sitcom Not Going Out uses aerial views of Walton-on-Thames between scenes. Just south of the town, Hersham had its own screen moment when the second series of the BBC drama Ashes to Ashes was filmed there, extending Walton’s long, largely unplanned relationship with film and television production into a fourth decade beyond the closure of its own studio.