Some of the BBC's 2011 adaptation of Dicken's Great Expectations was filmed in a bitterly cold Thornham Marshes in late November. During the shoot, Bernard Hill had to wade through freezing muddy creeks at night, with a light on top of a cherry picker provising an artificial moon. One of the production team's lighting technicians, TC Thomas, was a former pupil at the nearby Glebe school in Hunstanton and had left Thornham to work in the film industry five years previously, but could remember what the marshes could be like in winter.

While Dickens originally set the story on the north coast of Kent in the Thames Estuary, the BBC production chose the marshes of Norfolk and Essex because the Kent cost is now quite built up now and Thornham has the same sort of bleak, flat quality that they wanted.

Thornham Marshes in Norfolk we also used for filming the BBC drama.