I Am What I Am by John Barrowman (white hot kiss .TXT) 📕

When we’re filming Torchwood, as I leave the BBC lot at the day’s end, one of the producers gives me what’s called the script ‘sides’ for the following day. The ‘sides’ have the next day’s schedule attached to the front, and they also list my individual scenes, with my lines separated out from the script as a whole.

The last thing I do before going to sleep2 on the nights before filming is to learn my lines for the next day. In the morning, when I get to my trailer and before I’m called into make-up, I run through my lines again. This is one of the few times in my day when I’m on set that I really insist on not being disturbed.

Some directors, like Euros Lyn, who directed ‘Children of Earth’, will call for an ‘artists’ rehearsal’ first, which allows those of us in the scene to run through the script without the clutter of cameras, cables and all the crew.3

Sets can be crowded at the best of times and when I’m in a big studio, I don’t always notice how crowded. For example, when rehearsing or taping Tonight’s the Night, sometimes close to sixty crew people could be working around me and in the close vicinity. Imagine similar numbers in a space like the set of the Hub, which was easily half the size of a BBC entertainment studio, and, as I’ve mentioned, far more complicated and layered in its design.

Whenever Burn and I were given our guns for a scene – in my case, Jack’s Webley – and we’d run through the script for the artists’ or the crew’s rehearsal, Burn and I always did the guns’ sound effects.

When weapons or explosives are used in a scene, the set-up is complex and time-consuming because of the obvious safety concerns, the noise levels, and the fact that gunfire and explosions are expensive to create. Burn and I were always happy to substitute our man-made sound effects during these rehearsals. We were like little boys with big toys. We’d charge into the scene, point our weapons and in unison yell, ‘Blat! Blat, blat, blat, blat! Blat!’

As we were filming one particular scene, after Burn and I had done a number of rehearsals with our guns, the director was ready for the real action.

I ran into the scene, pointed my gun, and then I did all the gun’s sound effects with great expression: ‘Blat! Blat, blat, blat, blat! Blat!’ At the same time, the real sound effects and squibs were fired.

‘Cut! Erm, John, everything okay?’

‘Fuck!’ I realized what I’d done. I’d ruined the take with my sound-effect ‘blats’. Can you imagine watching that scene? How stupid would Jack have looked catching up to an alien and making his own gun noises as he shoots him? I’m sure my sound effects made our end-of-season blooper reel.

Another shoot that may have made a few contributions to that reel was the filming of the episode ‘Adam’, which I’ve always thought was one of the better written in the Torchwood canon. Catherine Tregenna penned the script.

Since so much of this episode was in flashbacks, with Adam in Jack’s childhood memories, the cast and crew had to be mobile. I spent a significant part of my days on location in the sand dunes at Merthyr Mawr; I then came home and spent a significant part of my nights finding sand in every nook and cranny of my body.4

If you remember the episode, at one point Jack screams for his brother during a windstorm, which was created on the sand dune, with me standing in front of a huge green screen with an industrial-sized fan blowing sand directly at me. The intensity of the sand swirling around me would be added later with CGI, but I still had to have my eyes rinsed out after each take. I went through a couple of pairs of contact lenses that day.

My memories of the ‘Adam’ episode are of a number of things going wrong. The first scenes we shot were filmed in tunnels created on the set to look like the sewers of Cardiff. Captain Jack is searching for a Weevil when his father appears to him. The set was dark and dank and really did look like a sewer. The problem was that the prop crew had run too much scummy water on the ground – so two things happened. The first was that the water running into the tunnel was dripping onto a couple of the fake pipes, which were, in fact, made of styrofoam. Andy Goddard, who was directing this episode, along with Jeff Matthews, the sound recordist, could hear that they sounded like styrofoam when the drips hit them. The crew had to figure out a way to stop the dripping. The second thing that happened as a result of too much groundwater was that when I climbed down into the sewer, too much water splashed up on my trousers and on the cameras. Solution? Everyone on crew grabbed a bucket and hauled water out to the real sewers.

One of the things I learned quickly when working on a television drama is that you have to have a lot of professional patience.5 After a scene is filmed from one angle, the director then asks for a ‘turnaround’, which means, funnily enough, that the cameras are all turned round and the scene is filmed from another angle; and, if necessary, another after that. In the sewer scene, the director needed a close-up of my face when Jack realizes the figure in the sewer is his father, so we had to do several turnarounds on this shoot.

After the crew had completed their impersonations of Mickey from Fantasia, the filming shifted to Captain Jack’s office, where Jack has to interrogate Ianto, who, thanks to Adam, Jack thinks has committed murder. The challenge of this scene was that the green lights from the lie