Mission 2110 in progress in Loch Striven

Have you seen the fabulous Avatar? That imported, steel, high-tech universe, fuelled by violent imperial intent? The ‘outstation’, like a giant metal portacabin, plonked down and terrifyingly, indestructibly alien in the midst of a lush nature? Those strange headless robots, their human uber-controller strapped in behind weapon-proof glass in their chests. And their juggernaut, high-kneed, fast rhythmic tramp over anything that got in the way?

CBBC’s new sci-fi series, Mission 2110 (twenty-one ten), with its first series due to air towards the end of April, was created well before Avatar had its premiere but its setting and its interior has something of the same strange disjunction.

The world of Mission 2110

It is being shot on the raft of Maersk container ships currently laid up in Loch Striven in Argyll. In this remote, virtually empty landscape, with the long, narrow depths of the loch slotted between steep hillsides, these structures, with their bristling decks and their towering accommodation blocks topped off by the bridges, are indeed beamed down from somewhere else.

Their hard-shell, still exteriors give no hint that any life goes in within them, let alone the collision of worlds and cultures that currently co-exist there.

Here is the disciplined, professional world of the shipping industry, with a 12-strong crew of engineers under Captain David Johnstone, skipper of the entire raft. Their job is the busy daily routine of maintaining the vital systems of the laid up ships.

Here is the world of the film unit, 60 of whom are living on board between two ships, Beaumont and Bentonville. 12 others live ashore on Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. The reason for this is that the two ‘warm’ ships, whose generators keep the entire raft of ships in a recoverable state of tick-over – Maersk reckon they can have the ships ready to leave the loch within a week – can accommodate no more than 72. The cost of ‘warming up’ another of the laid up ships to sleep the additional 12 in the film unit would have been way above the budget.

That leaves 12 exiles needing daily transport between Bute and the ships in Loch Striven, with only their accommodation block superstructures visible from Rothesay, looking like a strange and huddled tower village.

The logistics challenge and Locations Manager, Stephen Burt

Enter Locations Manager and logistics wizard Stephen Burt, a human gold mine for this production.

A former prawn fisherman from Mallaig on the mainland opposite the Isle of Skye, Stephen got drawn into the film and television world by chance.

Ashore for a while – quotas being quotas – there was a feature film unit in Mallaig at the time and they needed a driver. Stephen applied, got the job, made himself indispensable across a wider spectrum  and was so valued that he was passed from one production company to another. He studied drama, plunged into the industry and worked his way up to Locations Manager, with responsibility here for the logistics of the operation – which are unimaginably complex.

It was Stephen ‘s idea to check out the laid up ships as a possible location for the Mission 2110 series. When he got onboard he saw at once how right he was. A consequent visit to the raft of a 24-strong BBC team saw it the same way. Maersk, who had never been involved in anything like this before, agreed to the proposition largely because it gave them a facilitation fee from the BBC which they will pass on to local charities.

The company has been concerned to make the presence of its ships in this still place as acceptable as possible to the local community physically overwhelmed by them.

Stephen Burt’s answer to the problem of getting the impossible volume of kit, props and costumes out to the ships was to commission the Lywara Bay, a former relief ferry on the Orkney Isles (and still with her Orcadian name), later rebuilt and in service with Offshore Workboats. It took her six trips, each with a 40 tonne load, to get the Mission 2110 gear out to the raft.

A side note on logistics is that Maersk gave permission for a hole to be cut in a hatch cover above the cargo hold of Maersk Boston, for access for some of the set items and properties used.

The answer to the regular ferrying of the shore exiles to and from the raft came too from Stephen’s Highland marine connections. The Orca, a Class 2 lifeboat-standard craft built at Cobh in the south of Ireland and normally making the tourist run 45 miles out into the Atlantic to the St Kilda archipelago, is in Loch Striven. She, Angus, her skipper and a crew including Seamus Morrison from Tarbert in the Isle of Harris, made the trip south. Moored at the pontoon at water-level beside the vast bulk of Maersk Boston, the nearest ship to the east shore of the loch, Orca looks like a minnow. Up close, she’s a very substantial, stout and fabulously stable and comfortable boat. She supplies her own survival suits for those she carries. That’s a condition of her class – and class is the best word to describe her.

Her crew also have some pretty cool burgundy fleeces. Stephen Burt has been given one as an honorary crew member. (As a seasoned mariner, he is qualified to handle the workboats which are used to ferry small numbers ashore.) Captain Johnstone covets one of these fleeces and lets no chance pass him to remark on his exclusion from the elite few.

The marriage of worlds

How will the world of the ships appear in the world of Mission 2110 when the series is aired?

The world of 2110 is an unnaturally mechanical  world in which the hero figure, Caleb and his young assistants – beamed up from the more innocent and natural world of 2010 – work together to defeat the rogue Roboidz, threatening to take over the planet.

Caleb’s mother, whose voice guides him in moments of peril, created the Roboidz as benign and helpful but has seen them run amok and, power hungry, threaten the survival of all she has known.

The world in which all of this happens in the series will be seen to take place on the ships, whose location on Loch Striven will be visible. They will, though, naturally have lost the Maersk name on their sides and they will also be reduced to five. The black hulled Sealand Performance, Maersk owned through a subsidiary company and coming up to the end of her working life, is being visually removed, leaving a uniform set of five identical Maersk B-class ships as the setting for the battles.

Ironically, while Sealand Performance will be banished from the setting, her conveniently flush deck (pictured top) will feature in one of the conflict scenes with the Roboidz.

Virtually all areas of the ships are used as backgrounds for scenes in the drama. The central role of the young people is to collect enough bio-rods to free the planet. Since this is done via a series of challenge games reminiscent of the Crystal Maze, each challenge is set in a different place. Some are in the engine room, some alongside the giant propeller shaft, some on the decks, some in the cargo hold.

One of the most spectacular games takes place on the Vaporiser set, the triangular floor for which was manufactured locally, by metalworkers on Bute. It took four weeks to install in the cargo hold – three weeks to assemble it there and one week for the lighting specialists to install the special effects. It is likely to provide one of the knock-out (and it does) enduring images from the series.

All of the madness and conflict of the world of Mission 2110 goes on without even being audible to the engineers working on the raft. On one occasion, some explosive flash ‘bombs’ used turned out to be a lot more powerful than expected (pyrotechnics are a common theatrical hazard) and within Boston the sound was immense. It wasn’t even noticed on the bridge of the adjoining Maersk Beaumont, nor was it heard ashore.

The young actors

The ships have seen two ‘fleets’ of young actors, sixteen in each of the two series.

They live on board, boys on Bentonville, girls on Beaumont, with Baltimore – and watchful chaperones – between them.

Thee are three tutor/chaperones who work with them constantly, doing schoolwork in between film takes. They work a long day, getting up at 6.15am and constantly on the go until after dinner in the evening, after which they fall gratefully into their beds. The disciplined routine of this life, dictated in part by the operation of the ships and in part by the film schedule, will stand to their credit later on.

Living and working in this doubly alien environment – of steel ships and of 2110 – will feed their imaginations for the rest of their lives. They are unlikely ever to experience anything so utterly different from everyday reality as this is.

All of the children making it into the series have come through a complex selection process, first numerically – with a massive number of applications for auditions; then in terms of abilities, teamwork and performance.

When we were there, we met tutor/chaperone Andy Robson with his team for the day: Serena, Millie, Isaac, Lois and Alastair – from Glasgow, sharp as a tack and obviously a life force in the group.

This is where we came up hard against the reality of these children’s lives in the series. The war against the Roboidz has got to the point of attrition. Children are being wasted. We’re in the eliminators. Each day the young champion who has gathered fewest bio-rods is zapped – and the zapped ones leave the ships that day.

Talk about being ‘ripped untimely’ from the womb of the ships and its very specific enclosed life – this mus be painful for those who have to go and for those left behind without them. The bonds in these teams are strong and the departures tearful.

Of the children we met, Isaac and Lois were already toast. They would have been shipped out the day before but the bad weather meant that they had got a extra two nights on the raft. Alastair volunteered that he would really miss Isaac as he was ‘very funny’.

A secret feature of the departure of the zapped ones has only gradually become evident to the production crew. Stephen Burt says that they have had to keep making the bio-rods at a fiendish rate. They’ve been going missing. Not a bad souvenir of the job of a lifetime.

The challenge  of casting the adult roles

As in the appointment of Stephen Burt as Locations Manager, with the added value of his wealth of marine experience, the same inspiration has fed the casting of the adult actors in the series.

The challenges they face are specific and significant. Caleb, the hero of the piece and the leader of the young knights of the steel table, is the Richard O’Brien figure, guiding and exhorting his crew through the challenges they face for the planet. While he has a script, he has, as an actor, to be able to engage directly with the young players, to react spontaneously to what happens and to drive the emotional score of each scene.

This requires a complex set of skills not likely to be found in a traditional actor.

So the casting director looked elsewhere.

Caleb and the three actors who inhabit the Roboidz, are street performers, based at the scene in London’s Covent Garden and appearing elsewhere around the country as opportunity dictates.

They know all about engaging with a live audience. They are experienced in responding to the unpredictable. Their performance work is a balance between a running order and the ability to improvise. They live on their wits. Their street acts are physical, so they are relatively fit – and they’ll be a lot fitter a the end of this job. The cargo hold floor is the accessible bottom of the ship. From there to the refectory and to their cabins, both far above,  every steep step must be climbed several times a day. Take it from us, you feel it.

The bright, quick-faced Stuart Goldsmith, also a comedian, is Caleb and his partner in their street act, Noel Byrne, is a Roboid. Another street act pair, Gareth Jones and Richard Garrety, play the other two Roboidz. (And it’s a close knit world. Stuart and Noel knew a long-time friend of ours, a street perfomer  from the York scene – Andy Baloney of the Baloney Brothers.)

The production built three Roboidz, each with a different character and role – the most fearsome being the red flashed War Droid. God knows what they cost but we’re talking a row of noughts. They have been designed with press on ‘role’ pieces, so the basic steel body armour can have appropriate ‘colour identifiers’ added. This means that that the three basic roboidz can represent one of each species, or three of a single type.

They were built by the geniuses creating many of the Dr Who creatures, Cybermen and Millennium FX. The actors inside operate the arms, legs and torso but animatronics experts remotely control the pretty scary heads and the costume lighting. CGI techniques multiply them to overrun the world, threatening the young adventurers.

The suits weight 80kg. It takes an unbelievably long time for the actors to get inside them – although we  felt that the stage management routines we witnessed were quite slack and could have got it done much faster.What was invention was the devising of support devices to hold up the actors arms, taking the weight of the suit off them during robing. And they had odd shooting-stick like kit to support their bodies.

The weight of the costume means that the actors can only stay inside the Roboidz for half an hour. Filming has to be scheduled to take this into account.

In the word of Mission 2110 there are also the Shades, strange, attenuated zombie-like figures who are as frightening as the Roboidz. Some of the crew on the ship have been given a cameo turn as a Shade. The costumes are all-enveloping and the actors cannot be seen.

Captain Johnstone was looking forward to his own brief life as a Shade. To the enduring chagrin of this Munro-bagger and conqueror of Kilmanjaro with Everest in his sights, he was turned down. He was, in his own words, ‘too wee’ for the costume. This is theatre.

When can we see it?

The first series of Mission 2110 airs at the end of April. We’ll keep you posted on the confirmed transmission date. We’ve seen some rough cuts we can’t talk about – but we can say that this series has all the hallmarks of a major cult programme.

Two series have been filmed. If, as is highly likely, further series are commissioned, the script will have to move the world of Caleb and the young time travellers from 2010 – and their adversaries – to a new scenario. The ships will have gone.

Like the actors and the production crew, the ships themselves will never be the same again. Maersk Boston will have a new hatch cover on her cargo hold to replace the one cut to drop set and props items straight down. Will the gym on Maersk Beaumont ever lose the warm evocations of the children whose tutorial den it has become? Will the tramp of the Roboidz echo forever through the hulls of these ships as they go about their workaday business? Will Sealand Performance go to her grave with a unique last adventure on her record?

Will Captain Johnstone forget the hurt of rejection as a Shade? Will he get his Orca Fleece?

This is Mission 2110.

All photographs accompanying this feature are by copyright holder, Rebecca Martin and may not be reproduced without permission.

And a footnote on Avatar: at last night’s Oscar 2010 ceremony, Avatar lost the Best Picture Oscar to The Hurt Locker. Tall poppy syndrome. It will be remembered when The Hurt Locker is a rusty heap of junk.