I’m not spoiling the first episode of Bluestone 42 when I say that the action starts in a Chinook helicopter (one of
those massive ones). I say ‘action’ but the scene is actually just soldiers
talking. Or, more accurately, yelling. And in some ways, this scene illustrates
all of the joys and nightmares of military research and how it collides and
colludes with comedy and drama.
Why are they in a Chinook? Well, it looks
great, obviously – especially with the set that Harry Banks’ creative cohorts
put together. A Chinook is an exciting place to start a TV comedy. It’s the
first scene of the first episode and it screams loud and clear that this is not
a show set in a laundrette or a failing video store. We have a bunch of
soldiers on their way to a mission.
But that’s not the only reason. Richard and
I put them in a Chinook because people we talked to say they used Chinooks in
Afghanistan all the time to get around – because the roads are, unsurprisingly,
quite dangerous. So for accuracy, we wanted them in a Chinook.
The problem is that this conflicted with a
different piece of military advice we had which ran along these line: ‘If
you’re doing a TV show about soldiers there’s only one thing that really annoys
soldiers (apart from BBC’s attempt to get an actor to wear a beret in a
convincing way). The most annoying thing is having people talking to each other
in a Chinook. Those things are so loud, you really can’t hear a thing.’ Ah.
And so we began the show already sitting on
the horns of a dilemma. We wanted to show Bluestone 42 on their way to an
operation but if we did it in the mastiff (the big personnel carrier) we’d be
going against one bit of advice that ‘they fly everywhere’. And if we did it in
a Chinook, we’d have them talking - when in reality, they don’t even bother
trying. Either way, we might look like we hadn’t done our research.
We wrote this scene over two years ago, and
occasionally re-set the scene in a Mastiff before putting it back into a
Chinook and having them yell at each other. After all, we’re making a comedy
for the public – who will believe you can yell at each other in a Chinook, even
when you can’t. Once we’d committed to that, we were also told ‘they don’t fly
everywhere because they don’t have enough choppers, or it’s just not
practical.’ And then when we showed the first episode to an Ammunition
Technical Officer, I said “I know that people don’t talk in a Chinook. Sorry
about that.” He replied, “I know you can’t really hear, but it never stops me
trying.”
Ah well. We tried.
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