Martin Wainwright: Bollywood on the Ouse

You can buy a jaunty postcard at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television that re-spells the famous Hollywood Hills sign "Bradford" and sticks it on a scrubby bit of the Pennines. Now, at last, the dream is coming true. Sort of. The International Indian Film Academy has announced that it has chosen Yorkshire to host its 2007 awards, ahead of New York, Hong Kong and Rome. Eck. They reckon 12,000 people will attend the "Bollywood Oscars" in Sheffield, which is co-hosting a four-day festival with Bradford, York, Leeds and Hull. There will be all sorts of tourism spin-offs, and the coup is good for positive thinking, after too many incidents linking ethnic-minority northerners with rioting or anti-terror raids. But the real agenda isn't just to get the Mumbai medal parade over here; it's the actual film-makers, the lights, camera, action, that Bradford and co really want. Cut to Emmerdale, that drystone-walled happyland invented by Yorkshire Television. It managed to get a genuine Bollywood crew from India for a plotline which saw Tricia Dingle, the Woolpack barmaid, get part-time work as an extra and then - woooo! - step in as the hero's bride when the real star caught a Yorkshire cold. One thing led to another, and soon another Mumbai team turned up in Middleton Tyas near the Durham border. They needed a location for Harri Puttar, a drama about a floppy-haired boy wizard which comes riskily close to another famous series of films, and word of Yorkshire's charms and cheapness had spread along the grapevine. In their turn, the Puttar stars spread the news about their contented stay, while the film museum in Bradford got on with preparing the ground. An annual festival of South Asian films called Bite the Mango has given Bollywood movers, including Meera and Anil Kapoor and the producer Mahesh Bhatt, the chance to come and lecture, but also have a nose around. The material for Bradford Bollywood film-making is there in bundles, and so is the audience. Go to any local cinema and the playlist includes at least two and probably more of Mumbai's 800-odd films a year. Among those watching are a growing number of "white Bollyphiles", a phenomenon the Indian Academy hoped to encourage when it decided to hold its Oscars overseas six years ago. The heroes with big moustaches and coy girlfriends have struck a chord in Europe. It's all great for the likes of Irfan Ajeeb, 30-year-old son of Bradford's first Asian lord mayor, who is taking a 10-month sabbatical from the film museum, where he directed Bite the Mango, to try to make it as an actor in Mumbai. If he does, he'll be back to work on Bollywood plots based in Yorkshire - which might prove a welcome change to the overploughed furrow of dumped-on but relentlessly perky northerners, all the way from Billy Liar to The Full Monty, Brassed Off and Calendar Girls.