The BBC's Bodyguard went out with a bang last night, as millions of people tuned into the show's finale. Written by Jed Mercurio and created by World Productions, the six-part series has been one of the BBC's biggest recent hits. It has dominated Sunday evening ratings and before last night peaked with 8.3 million viewers during episode five. That accounts for a total live TV audience share of 38.2 per cent.
Part of the show's attraction is its portrayal of police procedure, and a meticulous production process was needed to make the drama appear realistic – including the design of computer systems. The show's sets include detailed police operations rooms with large screens showing CCTV footage or tracking a terrorist's van on a live map, and there are plenty of crucial plot points that involve officers working on computers, looking up suspects on police databases, or, in the case of protagonist Sergeant David Budd, Googling keywords to find kompromat on the Prime Minister.
Creating the graphic design elements that bring the show to life was a painstaking affair. "The job graphic designers have to do has changed so much," says designer Matthew Clark, who was one of the people responsible Bodyguard's graphics. As well as Clark, graphic designer Catherine Wear also created designs for the show. "A graphic in a TV show these days is anything that's not a physical product. It can be a leaflet, a newspaper, a poster." And in the last four years, he says, graphic design for TV has started to focus a lot more on what's shown on tablets, computers and phones.
"We're looking at weeks of prepping-up screens," Clark says. The filming of Bodyguard took around seven months, and he was involved in designing all of the police IDs, computer screens and visuals shown on them. "There's a huge library of stuff".
Most of the software you see in the show is not "real". Clark says that in one of Bodyguard's police control rooms there were 60 monitors on display. These were controlled from around 15 PCs that pushed all of the footage out to them. "One PC was outputting two screens, which was mirrored to six monitors," Clark says. 'We had to design enough screens to divide up amongst those screens without looking repeated."
The images shown on these displays, which appear in the background of the show's footage, are largely down to Clark and those working alongside him. As long as they fit in with the colour of the set and the themes of the room, the images are fine to broadcast, he says. His team created fake CCTV footage by filming with a "camera hung out of the office" and made mugshots from images given by friends and family and additional casting. Non-key evidence photos we taken on the street or from other crime shows that Clark has worked on. Monitors that display moving images in the background of shots were controlled from off-set using wireless keyboards and mice.
Things get more complicated when graphics on screens are not in the background but are scripted to be focused on by the camera. Throughout the show, there are many close-ups on the technology being used by police staff and other characters, such as Budd's smartphone and the secret encrypted tablet that the security service provides the home secretary. "With Bodyguard particularly, because the graphics are so much part of the plot, the editor gets involved quite a lot," Clark says.
At one point in the drama, the police follow a car with a surveillance device attached to it on a computer screen. Each time the chase is shown in the final footage, the shot is listed in the script. To create this, the team purchased a royalty-free map and created a series of 30 to 40 frames with dots representing the cars. These still images were then animated by Chris Gibbons, creative director, from Revolver AV using Adobe Animator. "We then had to build in lots of shortcuts and controls so that when they're filming it they can easily navigate around the sequence," Gibbons says.
When filming, the crew's technical team can control these shortcuts using a Bluetooth laptop or mouse, which allows them to rewind to certain parts of the digital car chase if sections need to be re-filmed.
The same animation process applies to pretty much all of the computers used in Bodyguard. "We're building real software but it bears pretty much zero resemblance to actual software that software engineers would understand," Gibbons says. Instead, it is very restricted. Actors may be able to open a replica of the Police National Computer and drag a few images around, but that's all. Even something this straightforward requires actors to rehearse with the system, as if they don't interact with it correctly, it won't look right.
Even recreating something as natural as a Google search can be a complex process. In one episode of Bodyguard, we see Budd run a search for keywords he has noted down from the home secretary's secret tablet, which we're led to believe are compromising to the prime minister. "We had to submit so many versions of what we were doing [to Google]," he adds.
Google's brand permissions for entertainment and media use say all of its products and screens shown during broadcasts must look and act like the real product. This means it isn't possible to add extra buttons to the Google search page or features that the real-world product can't actually do. To get approval from Google, it requires a synopsis of the production, description of how its name will be shown, a script with relevant parts highlighted and visual mock-ups of how things will look. "We couldn't have a link that wouldn't be on the standard search form," Clark says. "It seems minor, but there was so much finessing to get it cleared by Google."
But the finished system is far from a functioning search engine. "We'll design it all to look exactly like Google and then I will add a bit of programming so that whatever key the actor presses, it types the pre-determined search term in the search box," Gibbons says. One key press will type one correct letter, even if the wrong letter is pressed on the keyboard. It's impossible to do something that isn't already prescribed in the software.
The situation is similar when it comes to the tablet of the home secretary, Julia Montague, and phones in the show. "We do a lot of fake phone apps," Gibbons says. These fake apps are created to stop mobile phone networks from showing up in controversial storylines and the date and time appearing wrong. He adds: "You can trigger it from off-set with a Bluetooth keyboard and it looks and vibrates as if it is ringing."
And even when items shown on screen aren't digital, they're carefully constructed. In one scene Budd writes down his phone number: 07700900431. When viewers tried to call it they were left disappointed. It's listed by communications regulator Ofcom as one of 20,000 numbers that are reserved for use on television.
Updated September 25, 2018 11:00BST: This article has been updated to reflect that Matthew Clark wasn't the only graphic designer on Bodyguard
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
