Ice Town: Life on the Edge; BBC Earth

Emerging into the same blinding sunlight that greeted last night’s bedtime, in a small town circled by snow-covered mountains geometrically slotted into the pure-blue skyline, it feels like I’ve woken up in a Nordic remake of The Truman Show.

It’s a comparison that surfaces frequently in discussions of Ice Town, which documents the lives of people living in Longyearbyen, the most northerly town in the world and the most populated part of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

“Every time I look at these mountains, I feel like I have to go and touch them to make sure they’re real,” says executive producer Wendy Rattray, who is making the series through her Greenbird-backed indie Hello Halo. “It literally looks like someone’s put a big backdrop there.”

At times it feels like a chichi mountain resort, complete with bars and Michelin-starred restaurants. But locals – not natives, for none are born here and the terminally ill cannot die here – will remind you of the dangers beyond the borders.

No one leaves town without a shotgun, lest they fall prey to the island’s polar bears. Sky Atlantic drama Fortitude was loosely modelled on the town, while Svalbard’s otherworldly nature was amplified in Philip Pulman’s Northern Lights trilogy.

The town is prey to extremes – the 24-hour sun of late spring and early summer is the mirror of the four months of darkness into which it plunges during winter. Ice Town’s crew left the town for much of this period as the community goes into virtual hibernation, but some returned to document the grim fallout from an avalanche that hit during the blackout, taking out houses and killing a teacher and a child.

“You can try to plan all you want here, but this place has a mind of its own,” muses Kirsty Hanson, who commissioned the BBC Earth series for BBC Worldwide. It’s too much for some – a casting producer who found the initial wave of contributors left soon after, scared out of her wits and swearing she would never come back; one producer/director left saying they couldn’t take the cold.

“Getting the marriage of the different skills needed – being people-focused and being used to filming in these sorts of conditions – has been difficult,” admits Hanson. “It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.”

For her part, Rattray says she is “amazed” that anyone could turn it down: “I would literally have bitten off someone’s hand to get this opportunity.”

She recalls her first day leaving town, when she learned how to ride the skidoo needed for a 30km trip.

“There was nothing there at all. You could see the mountains, but that was all. I asked to stop for a minute and take it all in. There was utter silence; it was loud in a way. I felt like I could have been on a completely different planet. It was one of the best days of my life – and all I did was take a scooter out into the valley.”

Svalbard is a popular spot for wildlife and travelogue shows.

Parts of Frozen Planet were shot here and presenters from Jeremy Clarkson to Alexander Armstrong have filmed pieces. Local fixer Jason Roberts is a permanent liaison for international productions. Few series, however, have attempted to get under the skin of the town’s human population, who are drawn from 46 different nationalities.

When BBC Earth put out a pitch for “extreme communities”, Rattray’s husband, wildlife film-maker Gordon Buchanan, who had been filming in Svalbard, urged her to take the trip.

After some back and forth with Hanson, an initial, slightly more wildlife- focused, treatment evolved into an attempt to follow a year in the life of around 10 locals. Skype calls with potential contributors looked promising enough to warrant putting in some development money to shoot a short character reel.

Which begs the question: what sort of people choose to live in such extreme conditions?

One of the first to be cast was Mary-Ann, who came out in 1997 and loved it so much that she converted the rig in which she worked as a cleaner into a hostel, filling it with eccentric paraphernalia from Longyearbyen’s mining heritage.

“Our first casting producer was staying there and told me: ‘The woman who runs this place is amazing – she has a polar bear with boxing gloves [right], she has all this mining gear, she’s obsessed with Bruce Springsteen and her hotel has a penis-themed bar’,” laughs Rattray.

(When I went out with the crew in April, the hostel was fully booked and Mary-Ann slept in the bath.)

Viewers will also get to know Santa Claus doppelganger Wiggo, the local taxi driver and tour guide; Mark Sabbatini, a former crime reporter in LA who now produces a weekly newspaper for Svalbard; and Christine and Grace, a young British couple for whom Longyearbyen is not remote enough: they’re now looking to move ‘off the grid’ to a cabin with neither electricity nor hot water.

“Everyone seems to have a different reason for settling here. But the common thing is that they plan to come for a year and never leave,” says Hanson. “People arrive searching for something, and they’ve got to be survivors and entrepreneurs – there’s a stoic, frontier spirit here. It’s rare you get to film with people this vulnerable. There’s no fallback here – if you can’t take care of yourself, they banish you. You’re done.”

Can-do attitude

Rattray says she finds their attitude inspiring: “There’s a real energy to them; if they’ve got an idea to do something, they’ll just do it.”

Thankfully, this went for the crew too. “I thought we should be speaking to the town governor,” Rattray says. “I asked Jason Roberts, ‘can we literally just go there and film and nobody’s going to stop us?’ He said we didn’t need permission, so we didn’t ask for it.”

Nevertheless, many of these people moved here to be left alone, and winning their buy-in, and their trust, was challenging. On top of that, everything simply takes longer: going in and out means putting on or taking off heavy gear or spiked footwear.

Rattray says access would have been nigh-on impossible without Roberts.

“When we filmed with the university, the first question was: ‘Are you shooting with Jason?’ As soon as we said ‘yes’, it was opened to us. I think filming was a bit irritating for our contributors at first because it is an inconvenience and they don’t realise how labour-intensive it is. The crew has done an amazing job winning people round – and knowing when to leave off for a bit and move on to someone else.”

Embedding themselves in the town for the best part of a year, the crew had little down time; a night in the bar meant a night surrounded by contributors and their friends, and they have walked the line between befriending the community and trying to keep some distance.

Capturing the ‘mundane’

The chief editorial challenge has been to capture what initially seem to be unorthodox lives, but which to those getting through the day-to-day grind of life here seem perfectly mundane.

“I’ve been constantly trying to hammer a message into the team: don’t stop noticing the odd things,” says Rattray. “You can quickly become acclimatised to living in this town, but the things that are different are what makes this place extraordinary.”

Trips out of town, spotting walrus and polar bear, have helped crew maintain this sense of wonder – and reminded them of the inherent dangers.

Crime is non-existent – which quashed Hanson’s dream of finding a Fargo-esque policewoman – but the wildlife and the conditions are a constant threat to the crew’s health and safety, and a gun-wielding safety expert must always travel with them.

“You don’t have to be that far away from civilised places to be in danger,” says Rattray. “If something goes wrong here, it goes wrong really, really quickly.”

On one shoot during the dark season, a husky dog guide got lost in a blizzard – just 20ft away. He was so disorientated that he couldn’t see where he was.

The light cycle inevitably plays havoc with British body clocks too. “Everyone had really screwed-up patterns in the transition to the dark season,” says location series editor Sallie Clement. “We had a five-minute rule: if someone wasn’t downstairs and ready, you’d go and bang on their door. There was no time for niceties. Anyone using an inhaler had to carry lots with them, plus one in First Aid and one in the car. The minute you leave the town, it’s wilderness.”

Ultimately, the crew have become unwitting guinea pigs for the theory that this place sucks you in. Neither Rattray nor Hanson are ready for a wholesale move just yet, though both enthuse about it as an antidote to life back home. And at least one camera assistant was itching to stay.

“I hope the viewer will ask: ‘what am I doing in this rat race?’” says Hanson. “That’s why I wanted BBC Earth to show people living in a different way. We all have that escapist fantasy. ‘What if I just sold up and went somewhere else?’”

Even with an experienced crew, some rookie errors were made in this unusual part of the world. In his first week of filming, director of photography Sean Lewis packed some sandwiches and a Mars bar for a shoot out of town to capture the construction of an igloo. They were frozen long before arrival.

The crew had to learn to really love space food and energy bars and to remember to fill a Thermos with boiling water at the start of the day and put Neoprene around it to avoid freezing.

And then there is the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ camera switch: if you film outside in these conditions, the camera will overheat on entering a building. Capturing actuality with people getting on with their daily jobs requires a mad dash to swap the card from one camera to another. “It can be a nightmare,” admits Lewis.

“It’s a whole rigmarole, getting suited, changing the camera, remembering to heat the lens or keep it cold, without slowing down the process.”

Everything gets cold quickly. “Cables can snap and break and I have to make sure microphones are certified to -40°C,” says sound recordist David Harcombe.

“I’ve brought at least three or four spares of everything because cables and batteries are just dying in the cold. Everybody’s got goggles on and they’re shouting from under masks to people five feet away. Because everyone’s taking layers on and off all the time, I have to double-mic them.”

Harcombe reckons he has captured 1,500 different sounds of footsteps on dry snow.

“When it’s not windy, it is so quiet out here. I’m doing some 5.1. It’s all digital, because it gives me a good noise floor, so I can capture that stillness. Dialogue carries a really long way, giving a greater sense of intimacy. Today is the first time I’ve ever heard birds here.”

Just by being out in these temperatures, you are learning all the time, says Wendy Rattray. “It’s the simple things, like keeping wiggling your toes when you’re filming so they don’t completely freeze. For anyone with a beard, their breath can make it freeze. Take your mask off and you rip your beard off too.”

All are aware of their responsibilities to the community. “There’s a tendency to film as much as you can to get the best stories,” says Lewis. “In the light season, you could film around the clock and barely register it. It’s a big commitment to ask people who live here to allow the cameras in for six months, so we’re conscious we don’t overstep the mark.”

BBC2’s Into The Wild With Gordon Buchanan was the first Hello Halo production out of the door, but Wendy Rattray hopes that, as a global commission, Ice Town will really put the Scottish indie on the map – especially if, as is hoped, the BBC airs it in the UK too.

“It’s quite headline-grabbing, it’s an unusual place – it ticks so many boxes in terms of scale, ambition, drama, visuals and humour, so it’s great to have this as one of our first shows. Also, there are not many indies outside of London making shows like this.”

ICE TOWN: TAKE TWO

There are ambitions to make Ice Town a returning series, though some contributors are mumbling, only half-jokingly, about getting a fee if they’re going to be followed by the cameras again. Certainly, there’s no shortage of stories and the team has barely scratched the surface of the town’s population.

The character of the town has shifted too: hopes of featuring a miner were dashed with the closure of the last mine, affecting 600 people, some of whom have already had to leave. Tourism is becoming a dominant force, and could become bigger still if this series hits the mark.