The star of a TV drama filmed in Cornwall has said he “didn’t want to leave” when the shoot ended.

James Norton plays the main character in the ITV series Playing Nice, in which two couples discover their children had been swapped at birth in a mix-up in a hospital.

The series was inspired by a novel set in London but the drama’s executive producer, Kitty Kaletsky, said “there was no more perfect place than Cornwall” for the televised version.

Norton credited the community around Newquay for not only welcoming the crew so warmly but for helping him learn a Cornish accent for the drama’s lead character.

“For Pete it was a gentle, quite light-touch accent, we didn’t want to go heavy-handed with it,” he explained.

The actor said weekends spent surfing and hiking cliff paths with local people helped him better understand the Cornish accent.

“The sense I got was people kind of slip in and out, there’s not one thick Cornish accent, there’s lots of different variations.

“They were very forgiving and encouraging and helpful in my becoming a token Cornishman,” he joked.

As part of his role, Norton had to learn to surf, so Pete Abell, head coach of Kingsurf Surf School in Mawgan Porth, taught him.

Norton said the “amazing guy” had also been the crew’s “gateway into the community”.

“The cast were really welcomed into the community and we all hung out at Rettorick Mill in Watergate Bay, and went surfing most weekends.”

At Halloween, co-star James MacArdle, noticed the drama’s four main characters looked like Abba, with two of them blonde and two brunette, so they dressed as the Swedish pop group for a party at the farm with self-catering accomodation and a bar.

“It ingratiated us with the community as honorary Cornish people,” Norton laughed.

Explaining the decision to swap London for Cornwall, executive producer Kitty Kaletsky, said: “These are people who, having discovered this catastrophic thing, are living on the edge – and in Cornwall, you are literally living on a precipice.”

She said the sense of a small town was important, too, in which the characters could “have an element of anonymity but also be in a landscape and a town where you can’t escape each other”.

“It felt like we got all of those – and some – in Cornwall,” she concluded.

Cornish filming locations for the series included Watergate Bay, Mevagissey, the Jubilee Pool in Penzance, Minions , Newlyn East and stretches of the north Cornwall coast.

Norton, a Yorkshireman, said he’d found the county to be “a jewel, it’s the most beautiful part of the whole country”.

“The locations for the shoots were absolutely breath-taking,” he added.

“We had an amazing three months, I didn’t want to leave at the end.”

Kaletsky and Norton said their film and TV production company, Rabbit Track Pictures is working on a new production which they hope will also be filmed in Cornwall.