A major new TV drama has taken an iconic Birmingham location back to the 1930s, discovers Roz Laws.

It’s hard to believe that this ornate room stands in the middle of building site.

Surrounding this splendour is rubble and scaffolding, but the magic of television has transformed the ballroom in Birmingham’s Grand Hotel into a glamorous 1930s setting with elaborate plasterwork, Art Deco light fittings and Corinthian pillars.

The hotel ballroom has been spruced up for a major new BBC drama, Dancing On The Edge.

Written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff, who also made Shooting The Past, Glorious 39 and The Lost Prince, it stars movie actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Matthew Goode.

Dancing On The Edge is set in the early 1930s and follows a black jazz band in London.

The Louis Lester Band is signed by music journalist Stanley (Goode) to play at the dilapidated Imperial Hotel, before an elderly audience who have never seen black musicians before. Many of them walk out in outrage, but a group of socialites are intrigued and invite them to play at a private party for Prince George.

Through their new friends, the band – lead by Chiwetel as Louis and including Merlin star Angel Coulby as singer Jessie – are introduced to upper class society, including reclusive Lady Lavinia Cremone (Jacqueline Bisset).

Birmingham’s Grade II listed Grand Hotel has been closed for 11 years and is currently undergoing a £30 million renovation to turn it into a luxury hotel.

The ballroom is the only usable part of the hotel, so for the foyer of the fictional Imperial Hotel, the TV crew turned to Birmingham’s Council House. The banqueting suite on the first floor was turned into the hotel’s foyer, bar and restaurant.

Other Midland locations include Ragley Hall in Warwickshire as Lady Cremone’s mansion, while the mining village she owns was recreated at the Black Country Living Museum. Kidderminster station and the Severn Valley Railway were used for scenes involving steam trains.

The reason the Midlands features so heavily is mainly down to Ruby Films’ producer Faye Ward, who previously discovered the region’s potential while making Toast. The drama about the life of cook Nigel Slater, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Ken Stott, was shot at Birmingham locations including the Grand Hotel’s ballroom.

Faye says: “It would have been far too expensive to make a ballroom set from scratch, but it’s hard to find a suitable existing location – taking over a working hotel is tricky.

“When I was talking to Stephen Poliakoff about where to go, I said ‘Look at the ballroom from Toast, that was amazing’.

“No director likes repeating locations, but we made it look very different. The set designer did a fantastic job in dressing it up and making the stage look beautiful.

“The Grand Hotel was a building site, apart from the ballroom which they were using for storage, but the management were very accommodating. We built our filming schedules around their building schedules.

“We filmed in November 2011 when it was particularly cold. As it was, essentially, a derelict building, it was absolutely freezing in that ballroom – not nice for all the actresses wearing flimsy evening dresses!

“We had to bring in lots of portable heaters, and the moment Stephen shouted ‘action’, they were whipped out of shot.

“Birmingham offers good access to some fantastic buildings. The trouble with London locations is that they’ve been used so much more.”

Of filming in the Midlands, Poliakoff says: “We were lucky enough to find this beautiful ballroom in Birmingham, which had been left marooned surrounded by a dead hotel.

“Public areas in the 1930s were enormous. There was a place called the Holborn Tearooms that was gigantic. We think of the past as quaint and small and yet these buildings were huge.”

The writer/director goes on to explain how he created Dancing On The Edge.

“The idea came to me when I was researching The Lost Prince. I was researching George, the fourth son of the King, and I discovered that his brother the future Duke of Windsor, Edward VIII, had hung around with the Duke Ellington band. That haunted me for many years.

“I decided to look at the financial crash of the 1930s, which of course is very relevant to us at the moment, but I decided to look at that time through the eyes of a fictional black band. It is based on or suggested by things that really happened.

“There was this wonderful conjunction of this jazz music leading members of the aristocracy to mingle with black musicians and it became very fashionable. The future king Edward VIII went to see the singer Florence Mills more than 25 times. I thought this was an extraordinary window. If we think in terms of the enormous racism at that time, there was a window where things might have turned out differently. I find that a wonderfully haunting time to set a drama.”

Poliakoff is known for creating fabulous casts for his productions – he’s worked with Bill Nighy, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon and Lindsay Duncan, but also likes to pick young people at the start of their careers, like Clive Owen, Emily Blunt, Tom Hardy and Gemma Arterton.

“We like discovering people. I have always championed young actors, I tend to write a lot of young roles,” says Poliakoff.

The star-in-the-making he cast in Dancing On The Edge is Jenna-Louise Coleman, whose talent he spotted before she become Doctor Who’s new companion. The six-part drama also features John Goodman, Mel Smith, Caroline Quentin, Anthony Head and Jane Asher, alongside the two main leads.

Chiwetel Ejiofor has starred in TV dramas The Shadow Line and Trust and the films Love Actually, Kinky Boots, Inside Man and Children of Men.

Matthew Goode, a Birmingham University graduate, has been in Watchmen, Brideshead Revisited and Birdsong.

Of his leading men, Poliakoff says: “Chiwetel is fantastic and also plays the piano – he’s very glamorous in this role. I had seen Matthew in various works including Brideshead, in which I thought he was brilliant. He’s a revelation as Stanley.”

* Dancing On The Edge begins on BBC2 on February 4 at 9pm, with episode two th efollowing night.