In 2013, Our Girl, a single drama starring Lacey Turner as Molly Dawes, an East End girl who joins the army, was broadcast on BBC One to critical and audience acclaim. Now Molly is back for a five-part series starting this Sunday. In this post, producer Ken Horn talks about some of the challenges the team faced when filming, recreating Afghanistan in the South African countryside.
I’ve just had to make some clips for The One Show ahead of Lacey Turner’s appearance this week. One of the clips shows Lacey’s character Molly arriving at the FOB (Forward Operating Base) for the first time and we see the place through her eyes. I’m reminded of the location where we actually filmed this sequence, in the stunning area north of Cape Town in the Bonte Bok mountain range at a place called Serra Della Camp, a beautiful wildlife reserve.
Though beautiful, the area was deceptive in its charms, and we quickly learnt what the Cape Winds meant. There were days during the construction period where work was impossible and on two occasions large parts of the set we were building were blown over. We had to bring in specialist teams to attach steel hawsers to act as guy ropes to prevent any further damage. The British Army don’t have this kind of problem when they build these kinds of things in Afghanistan as they make their walls out of rock and gravel, ours were made from straw.
Whilst construction was underway on the first big set the actors were in the UK undergoing the first phase of their boot camp. Colonel Nigel Partington (retired) was in charge and was tasked with taking a bunch of actors and turning them into what could pass for soldiers who had completed the rigorous fourteen weeks of training at Pirbright or Catterick and then a further six months specialist training in their particular areas of expertise. Nigel was undaunted and provided a comprehensive and well thought out timetable to get the actors in shape, and he quickly came to realize that as actors they are very good at absorbing character information, by day three he was amazed by how far they had come.
After a readthrough in London (most of the actors found this the most frightening experience of all) it was time for the long flight into the heat of South Africa and the second phase of the boot camp and acclimatization. Getting used to the temperatures was key to them being able to cope with the grueling schedule ahead, again Nigel and his team got them through it.
Other sets were being planned in the meantime, with the series requiring three large builds: the FOB mentioned earlier, an Afghan village where Bashira, Molly’s little Afghan friend lived, and Camp Bastion. The latter being in reality the size of Reading.
Lacey Turner as Molly in the new series of Our Girl
The weather in South Africa on the lead up to filming was pretty bad and it was a worry, we had travelled six thousand miles to film in the sun! On the single film we made last year we had filmed some sequences set in Afghanistan in a quarry in Leighton Buzzard and it had rained on both days, surely we were not going to meet the same fate?
Despite the setbacks and the constant rebuilding of the set we persevered, the South African construction team were amazing and just got on with it. They have a great “can do” attitude and are used to the climate. Luckily the weather behaved itself and out of forty nine days of filming, we only had four days when the sun didn’t shine.
However this was a mixed blessing for the actors. Whilst the crew were mainly sporting t-shirts and shorts, for the actors it was full battle dress, and on some days the thermometer was showing temperatures in the high thirties. We had to make sure that everyone was fully hydrated and bottles of water became the order of the day. Also rivers became an attraction and between takes you could find actors sitting in the cool waters, emerging and being completely dry within five minutes.
Confirmation that we had got it right came from our Military Advisors who all commented that what we had filmed looked exactly like Afghanistan, praise indeed.
Ken Horn is Producer of Our Girl.
- The first episode of Our Girl will be broadcast on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday 21 September.
- For more information about the show visit the Our Girl programme page.
- Read the Our Girl press pack, including interviews with the lead actors, at the Media Centre website.
- Read an interview with Our Girl's writer Tony Grounds on the Writersroom website.
