Health and safety? It’s gone wild!
Bosses of new wildernessTV show issue a 20-PAGE risk assessment
ARMY: Former officer Jack Campbell PRODUCERS of a radical reality TV show have issued a 20-page list of hazards contestants could encounter while filming in Scotland.
Among the dangers are shootings, forest fires, drownings, contaminated water, trench foot, disease, hypothermia, tick bites, not to mention crazed fans and midges.
Cut off from the outside world for a year, the cast of Eden will have to fend for themselves on a patch of West Coast wilderness.
The 24 men and women will be filmed round the clock as they hunt for food, catch fish, grow crops and build shelters to survive on the remote Ardnamurchan peninsula.
Only weeks before the big budget Channel 4 series begins filming, a risk assessment details the many dangers participants may face.
The cast will each be fitted with hi-tech GPS ‘man down’ packs with their heart rate and other vital signs monitored 24 hours a day.
All women will be given pregnancy tests before they arrive but mothersto-be can remain on the show, and potentially even give birth on site.
A 6ft fence has been erected around parts of the 600 acre site, near Acharacle, Inverness-shire, which will be patrolled by security guards. Action Media Safety – which advised on blockbusters World War Z and Macbeth – carried out the risk assessment given to Highland Council planning officials, who approved the project last week.
The ‘essence of Eden’, it stated, is to have a ‘community who are selfsufficient and able to build a new society over the period of one year’.
The report adds: ‘It is intended that the production crew will intervene as little as possible.’
The Scottish Mail on Sunday told last month how former Household Cavalry officer Jack Campbell, 31, who has climbed all 282 Munros, has been lined up for the programme.
The cast will also include a nurse with war zone and lifeboat experience, a serving armed response police officer, a former Royal Marine trained in mountain rescue, a yachting expert, a gamekeeper, and a fishing teacher.
Cast members will have medical exams and a psychological test to ‘ensure they do not have violent and aggressive tendencies’.
The document warns: ‘There may be an added risk of persons becoming aggressive and acting violently due to the stresses of living wild.’
A PA system called the Voice Of God will notify participants that help is on its way if tensions escalate but the producers hope the police officer, ‘skilled in conflict resolution’ can ‘calm a heated situation’.
The cast will have a rifle to hunt deer and game but it will only be used under the ‘close supervision’ of the gamekeeper, who holds a gun licence. Other ‘high-risk’ tools will include knives, axes and saws.
KEO Films, commissioned by Channel 4, asked councillors to lift ‘right to roam’ land access rules to make the site off-limits to the public from March 7 to March 20, 2017.
The report warned: ‘There could be a risk of unauthorised persons getting into Eden and endangering contributors due to them being unpopular during the series.’
While the crew get midge hoods and repellent, participants must find natural ways to fight the insects. They also face the risk of tick bites causing Lyme disease.
Pine marten and deer, which roam the Ardnamurchan Estate, are also classed as ‘pests’ because they will eat crops and unsealed food.
The cast will be warned of the ‘high’ fire risk in wooden shelters. There is also a risk of participants drowning, being swept out to sea on
makeshift rafts, and suffering from hypothermia in the extreme Scottish winter. Trench foot – an infection suffered by soldiers in the First World War – is a ‘medium risk’.
As well as deer, wild boar live in the forest. The cast will be given livestock, including sheep, goats, pigs, hens and rabbits. They will have to butcher animals themselves.
Water will come from streams and the cast will also have to make their own ‘compost toilets’.
A Channel 4 spokesman said: ‘It is standard procedure to prepare a thorough risk assessment preparing for every eventuality, as the welfare of those taking part is always of paramount importance.’