Comment: Dagenham officials should beware Hollywood smiles

MAYOR Sadiq Khan and other dignitaries hailed the arrival last year of a California movie studio company to turn 20 acres of Dagenham into a sort of cockney Hollywood.

LA-based Pacifica Ventures was chosen from a short list to create a £110 million television and film complex to regenerate the area with movie stardust.

The council should never have been smitten by Pacifica’s Tinseltown suntans and porcelain smiles.

For, while Pacifica boasted of hosting the set locations for Breaking Bad, critics pointed to a track record of court cases, financial difficulties and mothballed projects.

Dagenham’s development company BeFirst pooh-poohed these concerns. Now, to the surprise of few in the industry, Pacifica has put the plan on ice. It blames “Brexit”.

A flaky excuse. EU or no EU, demand for London’s limited studio space is through the roof. Netflix has just leased a large chunk of Shepperton. Pinewood, Elstree and Riverside are bursting.

The fact is, BeFirst should never have given Pacifica this prize in the first place. Its website boasts of managing studios in Albuquerque, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Yet the first of those was sold to Netflix last year, its involvement in the second appears limited and Connecticut never even opened.

Hoped-for studios in Wales and New York state also proved illusory, while Hertfordshire council stopped it taking over Elstree studios, citing due diligence concerns (Pacifica has countered that this was over a liability dispute).

Now, the good taxpayers of Dagenham are back at square one, facing a £3.4 million bill to get another plan together.

Lights, camera, inaction.