Mission:2110 – the fight back begins -17.45 Monday 3rd May

In this case the word ‘launch’ could not be more appropriate. On Sunday 25th April, BBC Scotland hosted a preview of its epic new 13-part series for CBBC, the sci-fi drama game Mission:2110, filmed on location aboard ship in Loch Striven.

The svelte Maersk container ships currently laid up there, rafted up together to form an intimidating monolith, are Futuregate, the world of a welter of renegade robots – Roboidz. These were created as helpers to humanity and were sent into space on an identified mission – from which they have returned changed – and violent.

They have destroyed the world as we know it. A single human is left alive – Caleb, whose mother Sybelle had created the Roboidz.

If he has any chance of saving the world – and the Roboidz have labs where they are busy creating more of themselves – he cannot do it alone. A collection of children from one hundred years previously, 2010, are beamed in to assist him in finding and stealing as many biorods as possible – the energy sources that fire the world of the Roboidz.

On Sunday, an invited audience at BBC Scotland’s HQ on Pacific Quay in Glasgow, were shown Episode One. This goes out at 5.45pm on Monday 3rd May. It’s a ‘must see’.

The quiet mystery of Loch Striven, reaching silently far inland, its protective hills guarding it on each side, its mercurial weather creating a spectrum of changes of mood and tempo, is the backdrop for the action.

This centres on the fortress of the raft of ships – a world of steel and machines and high technology located bizarrely in this green place.

Visually, the collision of worlds is clear.

We and others at the preview has seen snatches of the series of 13 programmes being filmed. We had seen snatches of raw footage as filming progressed. Here was the finished article, after the creative interventions of post-production.

This has added music, sound effects, graphics, voice overs – and the impact is – almost literally – stunning.

The intro slams bolts of sound with assaults of word fragments into the opening sequence. Anything is possible in a world like this.

Then we’re into the episode itself, with the young warriors working madly to overcome a series of physical challenges before they get zapped by the slow and stinking wired up zombies that are the Shades – creatures made by the Roboidz as slave automaton.

Some of the challenges involve taking on the Roboidz themselves, avoiding them as they guard the hart of their evil empire and trying to catch them at their most vulnerable moments when they are recharging,

They are  not all alike. There are Drone Droizs, Commander class Droidz, Battle class Droidz and the most fearsome of all, the War Droidz (above), literally red in claw.

The children sometimes are so tense they don’t breathe – or they gasp wordlessly. Most forget to speak, to call out what they are doing so that the rest of their team knows the evolving picture. Some are ice cool, calculating, strategic. The differences in their temperaments and attitudes are a rich part of the fabric of the drama.

And always there is Caleb, their leader, driving, guiding, instructing, supporting. His face, with its burning intensity, flares in and out of view. His voice becomes the thread of survival for the young combatants to hang on to, weaving its way through their actions, their feelings and our own consciousness as we watch them struggle and often fail.

The work is hugely successful in its genre and cleverly linked to an audience a little older than the target audience for the show itself through a Mission 2110 website. This has been slid unannounced onto the web in advance of the airing of the first episode. It has been quietly present for around ten days, waiting to see if people just find it – and what they then do.

And it has been found. It offers games where voluntary challengers can take on FutureGate themselves and anyone can find out more about what led to this last ditch situation where the world may be ultimately destroyed. These are the ‘back stories’.  Already gaming is under way and the back stories are being consumed.

If you said this is where Dr Who meets the Crystal Maze you;d be more right than you’d imagine The scriptwriter was Phil Ford, one of the Dr Who scripting team – and he has given the BBC not only a script but a wealth of the ‘back stories’ that feed the interactive website.

This massive commitment by the BBC has been made possible through the work of an integrated team, pulling together the film production unit with the web developers. Only this approach could have produced work as innovative, as interconnected and with legs as strong as this to canter into the future with a success in its backpack.

Everyone involved is clearly excited by and proud of what they have achieved – from Sue Morgan, with her eye to the CBBC brand, Simon Parsons, Head of Childrens’ Programming (below, centre), Series Producer Nick Hopkin and Sally Greig who led on the web integration side (below, right).

At the reception and before the showing, Shades slid quietly and menacingly by, often stopping to consider the beings they saw before them, their great red eyes promising detached destruction. They were indiscriminate in their potential choice of victim, considering the attractions of the presenters as much as those of the invited guests.

These included some of the pupils from Dunoon, like Ann Louise Ferguson, who had been brought out to the location on the ships to test the games and suggest improvements before filming began.

Donald McLeod, Chair of Bute Community Council, was there with his wife.

Stephen Burt (above, left), Locations and Production Manager, was as genially capable a presence as he has been from the birth of this show. The location was his idea and it was an inspired one. The show has been made for around £92k per episode – this may seem a lot of money but in terms of a production at this standard it is astonishingly cheap. The backdrop provided by the ships and their interiors is pricelessly potent – a major score for Stephen Burt.

Kate Sanderson from Maersk was there, in a grateful time out from her work in bringing the company, the crews and the ships in Loch Striven together in mutual supportiveness.

With her was Captain Fantastic, as folically challenged as Elton perhaps, equally inventive but infinitely leaner and fitter.

Captain David Johnstone, skipper of the raft for the entire period of time it has taken to explore, agree, establish and complete the filming of the series, was there, fresh from climbing Cairngorm the previous day.

A class act in his energy, his gregariousness, his humour and his very real but human command, he has been crucial to the success of Maersk in the positive way it has overcome hostilities to its presence in Loch Striven. (These were generated, not by Maersk but by the brutish Clydeport in its refusal to consult the affected local community at any stage.)

Well known now in much of Bute and Cowal – he drops in regularly to see the Harbour Master at Rothesay and Craig Borland, editor of the The Buteman – he has been liternally climbing all over Argyll and much of Scotland since he got here.

He did Kilimanjaro a year ago and is already planning an Everest summit in 2013. He climbs for charty and there will be real support for his Everest assaut from this part of the world. We’ll keep you posted.

Loving every second of the show, Captain Johnstone could not wait to be photographed with an attendant Roboid – one of the Commander class. A War Droid loomed bloodily on the left but was clearly too violent to be trusted anywhere near the humans he is fighting to crush in Mission 2110.

We’ll leave you with a small tip when you start your relationship with the series at 5,45 on 3rd May.

There are six ships in the Maersk raft on Loch Striven. Five are the elegant B-class ships in Maersk’s blue livery. The sixth is the elderly black-hulled Sealand Performance. She has been digitally edited out of FutureGate, to leave the symmetry of five identical ships as the unified fortress of the Roboidz.

But, in filming, she was the only ship there with a flush deck and it is her deck on which the Robidz are occasionally seen busily working on their universe; and it is her deck where some of the confrontation between the Roboidz and the children take place.

While she does not appear in the formal images of FutureGate, there are sequences when the camera flies in toward the waterborne fortress and  a blurred black hull can be seen by the quick eye in the midst of the blue hulls.

Her dark distinctiveness may have been visually obtrusive but it is imaginatively powerful, perhaps more so by being digitally blurred in these images, carrying mystery and menace.Is she there or is she not? It may be that editing her out put visual symmetry at a premium above dramatic power, She could have been the dark heart of the empire.

Anyway – ‘your challenge, should you choose to accept it’ is to see if you are quick enough to spot her presence as you watch the show. She played her part in it and it was an honourable one.

The photographs accompanying this article are by copyright holder, Rebecca Martin.