Page 10 - Fujifilm Exposure_4 Samantha Janus_ok

Television’s newest sensation, Ice Warriors, heat
IRCE COLD I ICE COLD I
ax, Draygarr, Morka, Zalan, Krell? No, they’re not just a collection of bad Scrabble hands, they’re actually the names of the Ice Warriors, skating fighters from a frozen future and the home team in LWT’s new Saturday evening show. A brash, brutal and
bizarrely entertaining TV primetime hour of fast- paced games, it makes the Gladiators look like a moderately heated bout of tiddlywinks.
Under the watchful eyes of husky-voiced host Dani Behr, teams of eight competitors (four men, four women) from around the country are tooled up to the eyeballs in padding and protective kit before being sent off to do battle with the equally armoured minions of the Ice Master, a prospect that even producer Andy Norgate finds daunting.
“The padding that the warriors and the com- petitors wear is absolutely phenomenal - I’m sur- prised that they can actually move in it but they do,” he admits. “When you see some of the games and the physical contact involved in them and then see some of the spills they take, it’s fantastic.”
According to Norgate - previously a producer on Gladiators for six years - the Ice Warriors con- cept has been kicking around on paper for a cou- ple of years. However, it didn’t really begin freez- ing into shape until about a year ago.
“This time last year, I was given some develop- ment money to take the idea and really try and make it workable. Okay, so we understood that there were a bunch of people called the Ice Warriors, that they were led by their intrepid leader called the Ice Master and that they play a series of games on ice. But what we basically need- ed to develop then were some games for them to play.
“I was dispatched to Stevenage Ice Rink with my trusty sketch book and stood on the ice trying to make things happen.” Slowly but surely, ideas began to come together. After Stevenage, Norgate moved up and down the country developing games, holding tryouts for contestants and audi- tions for Warriors.
In July of last year, the production crew moved into the gigantic Nynex arena in Manchester to begin building the colourful sets and working out all the logistical problems related
to filming a brand new show on ice. “Thefirstserieswasalwaysgoingtobeastro-
nomically expensive in terms of having to build and try things out,” says Norgate, who estimates that about £800,000 of the series’ £3 million odd
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