From doing her own hair and make-up to the disappearance of her beloved tea station, Niamh Wash recounts her experience of filming a BBC drama post-lockdown.
This is all part of the new world in which we find ourselves. I’m an actor. Back in March I was halfway through filminga new drama for BBC/RTÉ, when we began to hear that an infectious disease had taken hold in Wuhan, China. We carried on, as TV crews will always do. Then news came that there were cases in our town.I’ll never know if the three days I spent coughing, sweating and unable to leave my bed were symptoms ofbecause back then, no one was testing.
TV sets are huge, complex machines. What comes out at the end is a polished piece of fiction that looks like it all just happened and someone was lucky enough to capture it. In reality, behind the scenes is an army of extraordinarily skilled, highly organised, creative human beings wrangling flight schedules, food trucks and cranes so that someone can successfully point a camera at an actor dangling off the edge of a cliff in the rain.
Hair is slightly more complicated. My character is a platinum blonde, and I am most definitely not. I slither into the chair with four inches of black roots to the barely concealed horror of our designer. Nothing in TV ever happens in order, and you’ll often shoot a love scene with a character before you’ve even met them. We’ve filmed scenes where I leave the room and now, half a year later, I have to walk back in looking exactly the same.
Then it’s here: the first day of filming. I feel rusty, and – despite months of planning – I feel unready. The machine has cranked back into life, and we hope that it’s safe. The first day passes in a blur. There’s no hugging, everyone is wearing full PPE, and there is no tea. We rehearseand – having had the luxury of using all of my face for most of my career – I’m suddenly very aware that my eyes are the only thing I have to work with. At the last possible minute, we lose the masks and cameras roll.
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