The new series of BBC thriller Vigil has intrigued millions with the dramatic story of a British special forces agent who is murdered at a remote research station hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle.
But what viewers don’t know is that the laboratory – supposedly located on the inhospitable Svalbard archipelago – was actually recreated in a Kia car showroom on the outskirts of Glasgow.
While stars Suranne Jones and Rose Leslie spent six days filming in the isolated, icy outpost halfway between Norway and the North Pole, it proved a lot easier to capture most of the action 1,600 miles away in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire.
Producer Marcus Wilson said: ‘Our biggest challenge was creating a believable world on screen. We wanted people to feel like they were there.
‘So a lot of smart connections were made [of] the scenes where you start a scene in Svalbard and then we go into an environment in Glasgow that feels like we’re still there. We use a lot of technology, CGI, to blur the connections even further.’
Temperatures on Spitsbergen in winter – where the sun does not rise for four months – can drop to -20 degrees Celsius, and even in the four months of continuous daylight the mercury rarely rises above 8 degrees Celsius.
Mrs Jones, 48, who plays DCI Amy Silver, said: ‘Svalbard was amazing, so beautiful. We filmed in such remote locations. Every morning there were reindeer outside the breakfast room, we got to ride the snow buggies and we really had to layer up.
‘We tried elk and reindeer, which are part of the local cuisine – I had elk stew!
BBC thriller Vigil is set in the inhospitable Svalbard archipelago, but was actually filmed in a Kia car showroom on the outskirts of Glasgow
Vigil’s Series 3 Arctic station interior set, built at the Glasgow Kia Garage
The Kia showroom in Coatbridge, Scotland, before it was converted into an Arctic station interior for BBC filming of Vigil
‘The problem was that when we got back to Glasgow it was too hot because we still had to film with all our layers on.’
Other interior shots were filmed at Stirling University, while a quarry in Shotts, North Lanarkshire, doubled as the Arctic landscape – with some exterior shots filmed at the real-life scientific research unit Unis Svalbard in Longyearbyen.
Producers sought help with the challenges of shooting in the rugged landscape from experts who worked with Tom Cruise on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which also filmed scenes in Svalbard.
“They really knew the area,” Wilson said. “It was such an interesting dynamic. They’d say, “Well, during Mission: Impossible, we did this…” and I’d say, “Okay, we want it to look like this, but we have a fraction of their budget, so what’s the smart way to do that?”
“We wanted a Svalbard that felt special to Vigil.”
Vigil has become one of the BBC’s most successful dramas in recent years. The first series, in 2021, focused on a murder on board the nuclear submarine HMS Vigil. It attracted around 12 million viewers and was nominated for a Bafta.
Series two aired in 2023 and revolved around a deadly drone strike and was one of the BBC’s most watched dramas of the year.
This series delves into international politics and espionage as Britain, America, Russia and China battle for control of the Arctic and its resources.
The vigil continues on Sunday at 9pm on BBC One.
