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 ow did WARRIOR CHALLENGE find its army of modern-day gladiators, Vikings, knights and legionaries? What's it take to put together a gladiators' arena? Or a knights' joust? To find out, we talked to series producer Mike Ibeji.
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1. What inspired this series?
When my Head of Development, Mike Tait, approached me with the idea of running ancient warrior boot camps as a reality history series, I laughed at him. But I couldn't get the idea out of my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that not only could you do it, but it was a really good idea. You could make a really entertaining series, which at the same time answered serious historical questions. Just how flexible was a medieval knight's armor? How effective was a suit of chain mail against sword cuts? And what was it really like to live cheek-by-jowl in a Roman barrack block? I used to be a Roman military historian before I defected to television. I really wanted to know the answer to that last question.
I also wanted to compare like with like. If we were asking whether modern men could make it as ancient warriors, I didn't want to pull just anyone off the street and pitch them in at the deep end. I wanted people who were up to the challenge, and who wouldn't start complaining at the first sign of difficulty. That's why I chose modern servicemen. They were used to the military life, they knew what to expect, and I thought it would be fascinating to find out, for instance, what a modern riot policeman used to standing in a shield wall would make of Viking shield tactics.
2. How did you choose this particular bunch of historical periods? Why not look at samurai or Greeks, for instance?
As with all television, the periods we chose were a process of collaboration. We came up with a set of six choices, and the powers that be picked four. If we ever do a second series, I want to look at the samurai, and I happen to know of a historical group that re-enacts the lives of the ancient Spartans. Now that would be interesting.
3. Please describe the application and selection process. Did you audition people for the show as a whole or for specific episodes?
We wanted a good mix of American and British contributors across the whole range of the modern services. I had a very dedicated team of assistant producers who scoured the country talking to people from the police force, the fire service, the army and the air force. They put together a short list and presented it to our editorial team along with video footage of each candidate talking about why they wanted to take part. We had a broad idea of the types of services we wanted to compare - riot police with Vikings, for example, or Royal Marines with gladiators - but we didn't let that restrict us in the selection process.
4. What traits were you looking for in the applicants? What were some sure signs an applicant wouldn't be cut out for the life of a warrior?
What we were looking for was people who were not only tough enough, but who could relate what they would experience to their day jobs, and give us an insight into how ancient and modern warrior life compared. I wasn't worried about their fitness, since most servicemen are in good condition. What I was looking for was the ability to express themselves.
What I was looking for was the likes of Nick or Theo from ROMANS or Greg and Steve from VIKINGS, who could take what they were doing and say to themselves (and us): "You know, this is just like what we do today, only different because of this and that." And in the end, I think our guys did us proud.
5. Once selected, what kind of preparation did the participants have?
Other than informing them what they were going to be, we gave our volunteers no pre-warning whatsoever. We made sure they had no allergies to the food, etc. we were going to give them. Most of them were interested in this kind of thing anyway, so had a smattering of knowledge. But we wanted them to come into this as fresh as any ancient new recruit. In fact, the Roman volunteers ended up giving me the nickname Satan: as in "What has Satan got in store for us next?" I remember they were horrified when they realized we were going to take all their creature comforts away from them and make them sleep five to a bed in a room the size of a shoebox.
6. How did you choose the sites that you did for each of the episodes? What's involved in recreating an authentic Roman army camp? A Viking village?
I already had a very good idea of the places where I wanted to do this thanks to the contacts I had forged while making A HISTORY OF BRITAIN. The great thing about Britain is that there is almost bound to be a reconstructed settlement for virtually any period of this island's history.
For safety reasons, I chose to use the specially constructed tiltyard at the Royal Armouries for the KNIGHTS program because they had all the equipment and expertise easily to hand. This meant that we didn't have a genuine medieval backdrop, but Castle Bolton was just up the road in Wensleydale, and is one of the most untouched castles in England, which gave us some great interiors and courtyard locations. In fact, the Royal Armouries building is very reminiscent of a Norman square keep, like Falaise, so it didn't look too bad.
VIKINGS was easy because West Stow Anglo Saxon Village in Norfolk is very like the kind of Dark Age village our Vikings would have inhabited.
The Roman locations were more difficult. Arbeia Roman Fort at South Shields has some fantastic reconstructed buildings, which include the gatehouse and barrack block, but they are surrounded by a housing estate, so I had to pick my camera angles very carefully. I knew that Vindolanda could provide me with the fort location to do the final tests in ROMANS, and I very much wanted to use the bath house in Wallsend to show what life was like in and around one of these forts. The baths at Wallsend actually work, but unfortunately they were under renovation when we were there, so we had to go to a local health spa instead to give our boys their Roman bath.
Potentially, the most difficult thing to recreate was a Roman lanista training camp for GLADIATORS, but I happened to know that the Lunt in Coventry was a reconstruction of a military training fort, with a circular gyrus,or training ground, inside it. This is very similar to what a lanista's compound would have been like, and also gave us the opportunity to draw the parallels with Roman military training that I was keen to do.
The other great thing about Britain is that for every location and every period, there is at least one re-enactment group dedicated to bringing that period to life in minute and accurate detail. So I would like to pay tribute to all the wonderful groups who helped us here. We could not have done it without them.
7. What was the hardest part of creating the series?
The key difference between this and the way you usually make a film is that this was very unstructured. Sure, there were set-pieces, but part of the point of the series was to put our volunteers into these situations, see how they coped with them, then ask them to tell us about it. So it was pretty full-on most of the time. I remember staggering into my hotel room at the end of the first day of filming and collapsing onto my bed some time after midnight thinking: "What have I done?" It was so grueling. The good news is that it got easier.
8. Were you worried, at any point in the process, that someone would sustain a serious injury?
I was terrified that we were going to kill somebody! This wasn't like normal re-enactment: we weren't just training people how to look good on-camera. What John Waller, our armourer, was doing was teaching people how to get past one another's guard and stick metal weapons into the most vulnerable parts of their bodies. There's a point in the ROMANS program where he tells one volunteer: "Don't hit his shield, hit him!" And that's the point: it wouldn't have been worth doing if we'd just set up choreographed sequences. We had to pull back on some things for safety reasons - we had to keep the Romans' swords sheathed until they had barged through the gate, for instance - but all the time we were trying to find ways for these guys to really fight without actually killing one another. And we had injuries. One Marine had to pull out of the gladiator contest because he almost broke his finger in training, but that was nothing compared to what really happened to gladiator trainees: these guys had a mortality rate of 33% in training, so only losing one in six was pretty good for us, I think!
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A Roman soldier, steeled for combat
A fort to be stormed
Knight Mick Tribley doubles as a mounted policeman.
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