“Over the last 25 years, we’ve invested £300 million into Bristol, the regions around the films that we’ve made”, he says. The characters made here have become world famous, particularly Shaun the Sheep, which makes up a third of its business. There is even a theme park dedicated to the four-legged creature in Japan.

Aardman Animations was founded in 1976 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. After graduating they moved to Bristol, where they created Morph for the children’s programme Take Hart. Nick Park joined in 1985 while he was working on a student film, A Grand Day Out, the first Wallace and Gromit tale.

Today it employs 500 people and its latest accounts to the end of December 2022 filed at Companies House show a profit before tax of £1.6 million, with turnover of £31.7 million.

The west of England will probably be more familiar to readers around the world than they realise. Everywhere from Portland, Oregon, to Jamaica’s Port Royal and London streets have been recreated out of the landscapes and cities in the area.

There are over 190 production companies based here, churning out content watched by 800 million people each month. The region is best known for its natural history focus, making 35 per cent of all global natural history content, according to the combined authority that covers Bath & North East Somerset, Bristol and South Gloucestershire. Cementing this, ­Bristol was made a Unesco city of film, one of 21, in 2017.

There was a strong welcome here for the support announced in last week’s budget for the sector, with the chancellor giving a 40 per cent tax credit to small independent films and a 40 per cent reduction in studios’ business rates bill until 2034.

“We have become Europe’s largest film and TV production centre with ­Idris Elba, Keira Knightley and ­Orlando Bloom all filming their latest productions here,” Jeremy Hunt, a former culture secretary, proclaimed. “Studio space in the UK has doubled in the last three years and at the current rate of expansion, next year we will be second only to Hollywood globally.”

One example lies off a roundabout in Hartcliffe, one of the most deprived areas of Bristol, where the second site of The Bottle Yard Studios (TBY) can be found. Opened in 2022 with £11.8 million of funding from the combined authority, this enormous modern blue-edged building and its sister space, an old bottle factory, are highly unusual because they are council-owned and run.

Laura Aviles, is head of film at Bottle Yard. Having spent much of her career at the BBC, she joined in 2020. Filming at TBY and on location in Bristol generated an estimated £20 million for Bristol’s economy in 2022 to 23, according to the city’s film office.

Productions have included the BBC’s The Outlaws and Netflix’s The Last Bus, as well as Poldark and Broadchurch.

“We’re not in competition with the big studio complexes in London and in the southeast,” Aviles said. “This is the cheap seats, it can accommodate those lower budget dramas, which we really need.” It has successfully brought drama production back to the city, which took a hit when the BBC moved Casualty’s production to Cardiff in 2011.

Dan Norris is mayor of the West of England and the former Labour MP has made it his mission to champion the sector. On his watch the authority contributed the £11.8 million to build the new Bottle Yard studio complex.

“It’s a sensible investment because I know that we will get a really good return on it, and we do this very well,” he said. “The best predictor of future success is a history of past success. And we’ve got that.”

There is stiff competition with other local authorities across the country to bring in lucrative productions, in the shape of subsidies — something Bristol does not offer, Aviles said. “The Liverpool Production Fund is £2 million provided by the local combined authority. When a production comes to me and they really want to film in Bristol, they will always ask: ‘What’s your incentive, have you got any schemes?’ If their budgets are challenged and they know they can potentially get half a million towards their budget, then they will make that region work for them”. It is why many now cross the Severn Bridge into Wales.

What happens in Hollywood reverberates in the West of England and the industry has had a tough few years with the pandemic, the actors’ and writers’ strike and a gloomy economy.

“In film and TV there’s a bit of a reset going on,” Clarke said. “Three years ago everyone was looking for scale and now they’re looking for profitability, there are less new commissions. It has an ­impact if you’re looking to start new projects.”

Then there is the hit from inflation. In a studio where Aardman’s models are made is a small box labelled “left legs”, a sign of the intense work that goes into the animations. The cost of these tiny legs and the bodies they ­belong to has been rising — the fabric, silicon and clay. “Typically you finance a film two or three years before you start production and you budget at a certain interest rate,” Clarke said.

“Now budgets are under pressure from a higher interest rate, rising salaries and higher energy costs. It’s a real challenge squaring your rising costs in a budget set in a different time.”

The recent Hollywood strikes bypassed Aardman but sent TBY’s occupancy down to 25 per cent. In the wake of this, it has rebounded to 75 per cent, which is the norm, but it showed the studio’s vulnerability to global trends.

Despite these headwinds, Clarke says the ephemeral British creativity gives the sector a unique advantage, boosted by the budget stimulus.

“When we launched Shaun the Sheep in 2007, we were told, ‘You’ll never be able to do a series where the characters don’t talk’. The year we released the film, it did over $106 million at the box office. That is what I want to protect, what we are good at in this country; pushing the boundaries in everything that we do.”