Off the rails
Nightsleeper executive producer Kate Harwood discusses the BBC drama’s real-time storytelling format and reveals how the train-set thriller was made without leaving its Glasgow studio.
The BBC’s latest primetime series, Nightsleeper, unfolds in real time aboard an overnight train after it is remotely ‘hack jacked’ by sinister assailants as it hurtles from Glasgow to London.
But to make the six-parter, the cast and crew behind the show barely travelled anywhere.
“It’s very unique, and it’s been quite a challenge to bring to the screen because everything you see is internal,” executive producer Kate Harwood tells DQ. “We shot a bit on train platforms at [London] Victoria and Motherwell. But everything else is in a studio.”
Debuting last night on BBC One, the series stars Alexandra Roach as Abby Aysgarth, the acting technical director at the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre. She’s finally about to take a well-earned holiday when she learns the UK railway network is under attack.
Joe Cole plays Joe Roag, an off-duty cop on board and hoping for a quiet night. However, he becomes drawn into the plot on the train and must partner with Abby to battle both their own distrust and the unpredictable behaviour of the person or persons now in control of the Heart of Britain train, desperate to stop it from reaching the end of the line.
Produced by Euston Films and distributed by Fremantle, the show’s cast also includes Alex Ferns, Sharon Small, James Cosmo, David Threlfall, Daniel Cahill, Lois Chimimba, Gabriel Howell, Katie Leung, Leah MacRae, Ruth Madeley, Adam Mitchell, Pamela Nomvete, Scott Reid, Sharon Rooney and Parth Thakerar.
First announced in December 2022, the project comes from writer Nick Leather, who sought to tell a fast-paced, dramatic story from the perspectives of two people who are each trying to stop a train that is under attack from an unknown threat. That means 80% of the series takes place either with the passengers left stranded on the train or a team working inside the National Cyber Security Centre in London.
“So the tension is about the connections between the two of them and about the way they have to play off each other and what they learn about each other,” Harwood says. “It’s thrilling, it’s funny, it’s human, with very strong characters whose relationship with each other grows and develops as the series goes on.”
Leather (The Control Room) and Harwood (Hard Sun, Dublin Murders) took the idea for a story set on the Glasgow to London sleeper to BBC Scotland commissioner Gaynor Holmes, and the broadcaster quickly came on board. Key to the show’s pitch was its real-time format, which was integral from the start as Leather imaginined writing a locked-room mystery that plays out across the show’s running time – almost the same time the real Caledonian Sleeper train takes to travel from Glasgow to London.
But in a throwback to the early 2000s, when US real-time drama 24 was one of the biggest shows on TV, Nightsleeper was being developed at the same time as two other real-time British series – ITV’s Red Eye and Apple TV+’s Hijack.
“Hijack popped up roughly when we were mid-filming and we did go, ‘Well, maybe there’s something in the water.’ It’s funny how these things happen,” Harwood says. “In my opinion, drama is always good when you put some restriction on it, something that frames it, that compresses it. That means you have a set of rules you have to play by.”
Those rules include largely sticking with the perspectives of Abby and Joe, without going into the government meetings or police conversations that are heard about but never seen – unless they directly impact the central characters.
“Sometimes, of course, our characters are operating in confusion, secrecy and silence, and things happen to the train that the people on the train don’t understand,” Harwood continues. “That really pushes up the tension, because you’re not in every single conversation. It’s not like a siege drama where you will be one minute at the Houses of Parliament and the next minute in the perpetrator’s wife’s kitchen or something. You’re only in these two spaces, so it gets quite intense.”
While development on the script concerned how to mirror Abby and Joe’s timelines and link them together while they are in wholly separate locations, Harwood and the team at Euston Films had to work out a bigger conundrum – how to film the series, and where. The team were able to access support from the UK’s Network Rail film office for research, but due to the relatively small number of sleeper trains in the UK, and their size, filming on a real train proved to be impossible.
The decision was then made to employ virtual production techniques to make it seem as if the passengers are travelling the length of the UK while never actually going anywhere. “So the brutal truth,” says Harwood, “is there is no train. Anything you see is not real.”
At Glasgow’s Pioneer Studios, production designer Tom Sayer built three train carriages, which doubled up for the six seen in the series, including a corridor carriage, a sleeper carriage and a club car that becomes the gathering point for the characters stuck on board. A small set for the driver’s cabin was also constructed.
The carriages were then surrounded with giant video screens, which replayed the views from the actual Glasgow to London journey. As the show is in real time, whenever characters are looking out of the window, they see the same view that regular commuters would see on the actual route.
“It’s night, which covers a lot of sins, but at the same time, that was a wonderful piece of kit because it doesn’t just tell you the story outside the windows; it also helps you with lighting,” says Harwood. “So the light is very truthful. When a lamp goes by outside, it lights their faces, so that was fantastic.”
More traditional visual effects were also used, notably during an early set piece in episode one when the train pulls into Motherwell station and all the passengers are ordered to disembark by the waiting police.
“It was all a bit Marcel Marceau,” says Harwood, referencing the famous French mime artist, “because there was quite a lot of acting going on with no train. At Glasgow Central and one other station, which I won’t mention for story reasons, we could wheel in another train and then re-clad it later through VFX. But we couldn’t do that in the station that was standing in for Motherwell because there were trains coming through. So, basically, every so often, we’d stop, move away from the platform, let the train come through, then go back and carry on. You can imagine it was really time-consuming.
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“We did a huge amount of second unit [work] picking up the shots that animate everything, like the wheels on the track, the points changing, something coming out of a platform. There were endless small details. But what you will see is an enormous amount of CGI.”
Euston worked with VFX outfit The Flying Colour Company from the beginning of the project, even though it wasn’t initially clear how much VFX would be needed on the final cut. Then when the editing process was completed – a process complicated by the real-time narrative – the VFX artists could get to work.
“I’ve worked on a lot shows with CGI,” says Harwood, “but never to this level. I don’t think many of us had, but it took time, more time than I think we all thought, and I hope the general audience will get to the end and go, ‘What CGI?’ because that’s certainly the idea.
“But most of the time, frankly, it’s a train coming into a station, people either getting on or getting off or going through a station without stopping. The train’s not doing somersaults or anything. It’s not flying. So it’s that sort of CGI, which you aim to make feel invisible. The best thing you can say about it is that it supports the story. That’s what you really want it to do.”
Harwood also praises the cast for elevating the series beyond its claustrophobic carriage confines. “When I talk about character, character is only as good as the actors that inhabit them,” she says. “It’s a really wonderful, gifted cast. We’re so blessed with that in this country. I would like to celebrate them and see them celebrated. I don’t want everyone to just talk about the train.”
Now with all six episodes of the show already on BBC iPlayer, viewers in the UK don’t have to wait long to find out if the Heart of Britain will reach its intended destination. Indeed, Harwood promises a “fun ride” for audiences who do go on the journey with Nightsleeper.
“It’s funny as well, and that’s because Nick is such a great writer. People [on the train] are intermittently freaked out and funny at the same time, and there’s quite a lot of gallows humour,” the exec says. “I just hope people are surprised and delighted. I think it’s not predictable, and the way Nick has written it, the surprises keep going to the very end.”
tagged in: BBC, Euston Films, Fremantle, Kate Harwood, Nightsleeper