This was the last of Dennis Potter's television dramas to be filmed in the 'hybrid' format of studio videotape and location 16mm film.
The production involved six weeks of filming on location, most of it in Oxfordshire, but with selected shooting in the Forest of Dean (in Dennis Potter's home county of Gloucestershire, between the River Severn and the River Wye). The school where Eileen teaches is the actual Forest school Potter attended in Berry Hill and the children who populate the school scenes were local children cast as extras.
In temporary remission from his chronic condition of psoriatic arthropathy, a rare skin and joints disease that first afflicted him at the age of 24 Dennis Potter and his wife Margaret were able to visit the location shoot in Dean.