The award-winning BBC medical drama Casualty may be set in Bristol but since 2011 it hs actually been filmed in the BBC’s Roath Lock Studios in Cardiff, Wales. While the show has occasionally ventured beyond the surrounding locale it doesn’t happen often – and for a very good reason. During a recent visit to the set, Senior Producer Mat McHale revealed they prefer to put all the money on screen rather than spending it on travel and hotels.

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“We have done it (gone on location), but we try and avoid it, because the moment you go far enough away, you’re overnighting people and that’s a big expense. And that doesn’t really show on screen. Because we’re a tight budget show, we want to try and put all the money on screen, and putting 50 or 60, people up in a hotel doesn’t really work for that,” he explained.

He also said they have no reason to leave Cardiff as there are a multitude of areas in which they can film in no matter what the requirements of the scene are.

“We do try and do everything here. And we’re very lucky in Cardiff. We’ve got forest one way, beach one way, industrial another way urban, suburban. I mean, it has everything a stones throw away.”

Even with so much on their doorstep there are a lot of logistics in moving the production away from it’s studio base, which is generally necessary for at least some scenes in each episode.

“We have a fairly rigorous form on how we shoot the episodes. So each episode gets two weeks. The first week we shoot in this studio, on the back lot and location, and you normally have three days location. So quite early on, there’s a meeting where we get a document and it just tells you what’s going to happen, and then we have a meeting about that.

“All the heads of department are there, and we’ll talk (about locations) so we can start getting the feelers out for anything we need.

If it’s somthing like a bedroom, we tend to wait till the director sits down, because that’s relatively easy to find. We have a list of people who are happy for us to film in their homes.

Anything bigger in terms of set or location, if we’ve got big stunts or anything we need to rig. We start working on that potentially two months before we start filming it. Maybe two and a half.”

Occasionally they have no option though than to venture out of Wales such as for scenes in a jail which aired recently and were shot around two and a half hours away.

“One of our recent locations was Gloucester prison, which was good. Because, obviously you can’t go shooting in a live prison so we went to the old Gloucester prison instead,” Mat confirmed.