Cobra
As Covid-19 supervisors become commonplace on set, Tim Dams learns how producers are keeping the cameras rolling
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Working to new rules Sky
‘T
he show must go on” runs the showbiz saying, but even this old cliché has been turned on its head by the Covid-19 pandemic. Numerous dramas have temporarily halted produc tion in recent months following Covid outbreaks among cast or crew. Sky thriller Cobra, for example, started shooting its second season at the end of September, but returned from the Christmas break to find that 15 of its cast and crew had tested positive for Covid. Meanwhile, the third season of Britannia has just wrapped, nearly a year after it first went into production, in March 2020. The Sky original closed down two weeks later due to the first lockdown, then restarted in September but had to halt for a week amid positive Covid tests. Other productions have delayed shooting during the winter’s horrifying second Covid-19 wave. Conversations with Friends, the BBC follow-up to its hit Sally Rooney adaptation, Normal People, pushed production from January to spring. Channel 5 and Acorn TV detective drama Dalgliesh moved from January to March. Charlie Pattinson, CEO of Cobra and Dalgliesh producer New Pictures, says it has been important to display
“ultra-caution” over production during the pandemic. “The show business ethos that, whatever happens, the show must go on, and you just struggle on, no longer applies.” Programme-makers say that the industry’s Covid safe-shooting protocols, agreed last summer, in combination with the Government-backed £500m Film and TV Production Restart Scheme, have been key to restarting production. What began as a trickle last summer has become something of a flood. So far, more than 160 productions across the UK have been approved by the Restart scheme, which has been
extended to cover productions that start shooting before the end of April. Pattinson describes the scheme as a “vital safety blanket”, albeit an expensive one. “It’s also quite unwieldy. We’re not planning on making a claim under it, despite the fact we have lost a couple of days.” He says that a “rigid adherence” to the Covid production protocols has been important for keeping people not just physically safe, but also in good mental health. Cast and crew rightly felt “very fragile” around the New Year, when hospitalisations and deaths were peaking. “What people want to know is that we
