100 years from now, the apocalypse has happened. Our world is gone, replaced by a machine world, hard edged, caged, enormous, too dark, too light, full of challenge, full of terror – and overrun by Roboidz with factories where they are producing more of themselves. They are everywhere. They are unstoppable….

More of the scenario

The Roboidz are not the only threats. There are Shades – fewer of them but just as dangerous and just as unknowable. There is a raging Roboid locked in a cage that cannot contain him. What will happen when he bursts free – and its sides are already crumbling.

There is a Vaporiser laboratory. Everywhere there are pipes, cables, engines, machines, vast pipes containing God knows what.

The world is lost. Or is it?

The only hope is the emergence in this dreadful time and place of 16 young adventurers from another time and a very different place. The future of the world is in their hands. They must survive, They must outwit, They must fight. There is so little time.

There is a hero – Caleb – to help them when he can. There is a Life Force which the dark and the light both crave. There are bio rods that are the source of energy that will help to save the world (hang on – is this lark sponsored by the nuclear industry?).

Not all the adventurers will make it through. But one is destined to triumph. They must compete to identify that champion, who will be known by the number of bio rods gathered in the challenges.

Mission 2110 and its inspired location

This is Mission 2110. It is a new children’s television series which is a marriage of The Crystal Maze and Doctor Who. It is from 2010 that the young adventurers will come, bred in a better time and fighting to return the mad machine world to the one they knew.

The reach of the show will be extended through online drama and games – a clever initiative very much in tune with the today’s technology, skills and leisure interests.

In an imaginative leap, this BBC television series is to be shot on the Maersk container ships lying in Loch Striven on cold lay-up. Here indeed is a machine world – massive steel spaces, engines beyond imagining, traps and secret places and always the unknown. Sound is hard and echoes. Feet cannot be silent – unless they belong to the Shades.

This is already a world literally out of time and out of place. It is alien. It is from elsewhere. It is immense. It is utterly masculine. It could contain and consume anything, everything.

To create so powerfully appropriate a background would normally be  impossible within the BBC budget for children’s television – within its budgets for anything (except management salaries). Using these ships which, like many an actor,  are ‘resting’, is an inspired idea. If the production team get it right, this can be a big show and it will certainly alter life on the raft. (It could bring broadband for a start.)

Community benefit

The shipping line, Maersk, has given the BBC permission to use the ships as the location for the series – for two series. The company has done this because the filming presents an opportunity to conjure community benefit from the presence of its ships, rafted together on the loch.

At the first community meeting Maersk has ever held on board one of its ships – on Friday 27th November, with the Loch Striven and wider Cowal and Bute community, Stephen Burt, Locations Manager for Mission 2110 and now almost a part of the crew, (pictured centre below)  talked about the show and showed some early development clips of work in progress on the Roboidz.

So in return for permission:

• Parties of schoolchildren from Cowal and possibly Bute will be brought out to the ships twice a week during the six weeks in which the episodes of the programmes will be shot.
• A further party of schoolchildren from the area will be testing the challenge games that will determine who becomes the champion of the world.
• The facilitation fee which the BBC will pay for the use of the ships will, with an additional sum from Maersk, be donated to local charities nominated by the local community.

Some of the Maersk engineers on the crew of the ships rafted in Loch Striven have contributed development ideas now included in the games. They will enjoy seeing how they fare in testing and how they look when the programme goes live.

The ships and the logistics

The logistics of the programme series are gulp time. The BBC attracted 1,000 applicants to take part in the series as the young adventurers. In X-Factor style auditions around the country  – undoubtedly supported by the output of a mid-size Kleenex plant – they whittled these down to 32 (plus some stand bys).

These 32 will power episodes of Mission 2110, to be filmed here in Argyll on the Loch Striven raft.

In total there will be a production crew of 70 for the show. All except 12 will stay on the ships for the duration. The 12 are not absolutely ‘mission critical’ to the daily  schedule and will stay in Rothesay. if there are days they can’t get across because the ferries are cancelled, the skeleton crew based on the ships and involved in performance and production will carry on filming.

There will be one ‘minder’ for every six of the young adventurers. There are few scenes involving all 16 of them, so the requirement for their continuing tuition on set will be accommodated easily. Those not filming will be working on learning packages already supplied and a tutor will be on the ship to guide them.

Three cooks will be brought on board to cater for the production party. This came as a huge relief to the one cook looking after the needs ot the crew. When he heard that there would be 70 more onboard, he is said to have buckled at the knees.

Three robots have been built by the wizards behind many of the Dr Who creatures, Cybermen and Millennium FX. These will have actors inside them to operate the arms, legs and torso but animatronics experts will be on hand to control the pretty scary Roboidz heads and the costume lighting remotely. CGI techniques will be used to multiply them to overrun the world, threatening the young adventurers.

Life on board

This is going to be interesting.

A community of 12 whose life is bound by six massive and still ships, shaped by methodical daily maintenance routines, accented by dressing for dinner and governed, of necessity by an almost military discipline, will come to share the experience of the world Mission 2110 portrays.

They too will be overrun. They too have their own world to protect. What has been ordered, purposeful and relatively quiet will echo to the sounds of the 70 invaders. Diva-like behaviour from any of the young adventurers will get short shrift.

Mind you, such behaviour will probably stop at source. The young people will be awed by the massive engineering context and operations with which they will co-exist. In many ways they too will experience here something of the world of Mission 2110 – a world beyond the human scale.

Culture shock apart, there are so many positives.

The lives of the crew on the raft will be infinitely richer and more varied than is normal in such situations.  There may be more ways in which they contribute to the making of the programme series. Conversations will touch on new topics and will extend the range of familiar ones. Their nightly formal dinners will be their sanctuary.

The production team will be impressed, possibly inspired, by the quiet discipline of the engineers. There will be common ground in professional expertise to underpin some relationships.

The young adventurers may never experience anything like this for the rest of their lives. They will not only be acting in an exciting new series, they will be living in a real world that few except seafarers can access and know. Who knows how this will shape them, but it will. They will also be living between so many worlds – the world of Mission 2110, the world of the production and the world of the ships and their crew which will carry on as usual in its parallel universe. And they won’t be able to pop out for a MacDonalds.

Work in progress

We are arranging to keep in touch with and document developments in preparation and production of this ground-breaking initiative and hope to carry ongoing features in text, stills and video. Watch this space and prepare for contact with the world of Mission 2110.

When the first show airs on CBBC even those involved in making it-  and the Maersk crew who will have observed and supported it all – will see a Mission 2110 they have not seen before.

The photographs accompanying this article are by copyright holder, Rebecca Martin. The image of Mission 2110 is copyrighted to the BBC.

Related Posts

• Mission 2110 in progress in Loch Striven (2)
• Maersk Mission Loch Striven 2010 meets CBBC Mission 2110 (2)
• Press day on Maersk ships in Loch Striven and a surprise focus (0)
• Loch Striven, Maersk and the media (0)
• Loch Striven ship layups: rolling story (217)

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