Bollywood must move to Olympic site, says Mayor

Ken Livingstone has invited the Bollywood film industry to move into London's Olympic site after 2012.

He said the booming industry would be an ideal tenant for the International Media and Broadcast Centre being built for the Games in Stratford.

The Mayor, in Bollywood for the signing of an agreement to boost links between the London and Mumbai film industries, said:

"We are keen to sell it. If you are interested in placing an order we might even build it to your specifications. We are not building a temporary facility. We aim to create a permanent new site in London, absolutely state-oftheart for film and TV production."

Mr Livingstone appeared with Amitabh Bachchan, once the "angry young man" of Indian cinema who has become the godfather of the industry. The Mayor described him as "probably the most famous actor on the face of the planet today".

Mr Livingstone visited the set of a new film production of Aladdin in which Mr Bachchan plays the genie. He was given the honorary task of starting scene 17, take four, by snapping the clapperboard. "It's the first useful thing I have done all day," the Mayor joked.

Last year 38 Bollywood films were made in London, including Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, which used more than 1,100 extras and 400 dancers including many Londoners.

It was filmed at Tower Bridge and Waterloo Station, where Mr Bachchan took centre stage with with a troupe of dancers. Adrian Wootton, chief executive of Film London, said there will be 60 Indian films made in London next year - 10 per cent of Bollywood's annual output. Already UK box office takings from Indian films stand at £12 million a year.

Mr Wootton said: "In the last three years there has been a dramatic escalation as Indian films have been far more ambitious and because London and the UK are such big box office for Bollywood films - the biggest outside India.

"We make it easier and help them to troubleshoot. They want to do big dance sequences using the big locations like Tower Bridge and Trafalgar Square."

Mr Bachchan described today's deal as a "momentous and historic signing".

He said: "I think it's marvellous. This is a formulation of facilities that we would normally get but would probably take a lot longer and probably without any guarantees."

The media centre in London's Olympic Park is most likely to be used after the Games for post-production facilities rather than for set locations.

Mr Livingstone said he expected that Aladdin would be the first Bollywood film his two young children would see when it opens in London next year.

He said he had set up Film London in 2004 after seeing how former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had eased filmmaking restrictions in New York.

In London red tape prevented the makers of the Hollywood blockbuster Independence Day being allowed to use Trafalgar Square to mock up a scene involving the blowing up by aliens of Nelson's Column.