Pole stars

Posted by Andy Wilman at 10:00AM on Thursday 26 July, 2007 11 Comments

TG TV's executive producer Andy Wilman It's past midnight and I'm a bit drunk and quite happy, because I think that one worked.

It's a peculiar thing about telly, but you can watch one of these shows maybe 10 or 15 times when you're putting it together, scrutinising every last section for quality of shots, pace, narrative structure, words, music, the lot.

Yet you never really get a sense of whether you've pulled it off until you're at home watching it on the box at the same time as everybody else.

Afterwards I made my usual masochistic trip to the computer and logged on to Final Gear to see what our harshest, fairest, sharpest and most loyal critics had to say. I love the spirit of that gang, and they are superb at spotting where you've made a horlicks of things, but they seemed to like this one.

If only they'd known what a bitch it was to make. We came back from the Pole with over 180 hours of rushes to condense into one hour, and after about three weeks in the edit we started to go a bit mental.

Finding your way through the material was like trying to get out of that boulder field, so we sent a long rough version to Jeremy and he was superb at acting like a pilot flying overhead, giving us a great overview of where it was going tits.

Next I had the genius idea of making two versions, a 60 minute and a 90 minute, and we ploughed on down that path until we ended up with a 75 minute version that didn't want to go either way. Bollocks.

Eventually, we ditched the 90 because it was becoming a self indulgence fest, focused on the 60 and got our mojo back.

If ever though, you needed proof of the old adage that talent is 10% inspiration and 90% hard work, it's this film. Everybody - the film crews, the director, the presenters, the researchers, the back up team, the editors, the sound engineer, sweated blood over this little sod like never before.

What made me laugh the most was an internal memo in the BBC saying that all producers must warn presenters that filming in High Definition would mean all blemishes would be more pronounced, and they may not look as good as they normally do.

I replied that our lot look rough even in the dark from ten miles away, in a fog, and anyway they went through the mill so much during that journey you're lucky their faces didn't make children cry. And I think the shattered state of their mugs sum up what made the Polar film unique amongst our body of work so far.

When we set out to do a race or a challenge we have no idea what the result will be but we usually know the terrain and the conditions, be it Verbier or Slough, and we sort of know we'll be safe and that the ring of civilisation is ever present around us.

With this film though, when the starting gun went, we didn't know if we'd go 100 yards and disappear into a hole in the ice, closely followed by all the cash the BBC had given us to make the show. And when we did get 100 yards down the road, the next 100 was a genuine mystery, and so on, for the whole journey.

Would the truck ever get out of the boulder field once it dived in? Would the ice hold up? Would the presenters hold up? Would Hammond nail Jeremy and James in the final push? In the end, as it turned out, he was miles and miles behind, but communications were either abysmal or crap, and at the time nobody knew where anybody was.

I don't think Polar is the funniest thing we've ever done - it certainly hasn't got the joie de vivre of the American road trip, but we went to another place, spiritually, with this one and I'm very proud of that fact.

I'm also proud of what Richard did, coming on like the Terminator whilst the Two Fat Ladies shovelled in another Kit Kat. And I'm immensely proud, after God knows how many episodes, to finally get Echo and the Bunnymen into a film.

I could get into these blog things. It's just like blathering on in the pub.