BTS: Race Against the Tide

Tern’s new competition series for the BBC, Race Against the Tide, sees seven teams battle to build spectacular sand sculptures before the tide washes them away.

Series Director, Rod Tamime, explains how the show was built from the ground up.

We all like to say “shoot for the moon” in television, but on Race Against the Tide, we had to check where it was first! Making Tern Television’s brand-new BBC competitive reality series Race Against the Tide meant taking the usual complexities of television production, such as presenter availability, contributor diaries and crew, locations, but also adding in the gravitational pull of the moon. The diary of our host, Iain Stirling, had to be cross-referenced with UK tide tables and daylight hours; at which point we discovered Mother Nature doesn’t take production notes.

Having discovered not just any beach would do, an intensive recce of Scotland’s coastline took place, led by our sand expert Jamie Wardley. It was made clear that we needed the right type and consistency of sand to build sculptures weighing several tonnes and standing up to six hours of digging, pounding and carving.

Eventually we landed on West Sands in St Andrews. The town might be known around the world as the Home of Golf, but for one glorious week, we were determined to make it the home of giant sandcastles. Alongside our production team, contestants and judges came a sizeable local Sand Crew, recruited from students and the surrounding community to help shift the extraordinary quantities of sand and water required for each build.

Race Against the Tide is an adaptation of Blue Ant Studios’ hit Canadian format, originally made for CBC. We were incredibly fortunate to have advice from Canadian showrunner and producer Carly Spencer, who knows better than most how to make a television format in which Mother Nature has final cut.

But this couldn’t simply be the Canadian show transplanted to Scotland. We wanted to create a distinctly Tern version: warm, funny, ambitious, and unmistakably Scottish.

At its heart, this is a craft competition, so Series Director Jennifer Morrison brought her years of experience on The Great Pottery Throw Down to the shoreline.

Casting presented another unusual challenge. We needed seven brilliant professional sand sculptors from across the UK and Europe, but we also wanted seven complete newcomers who could learn enough of this extraordinary discipline to genuinely compete alongside them. A rigorous practical casting process followed.

Then we needed judges. Our sand expert Jamie Wardley’s encyclopedic knowledge and infectious enthusiasm for absolutely everything sand-related was an obvious choice. Fortunately, our BBC Commissioning Editor Ricky Cooper agreed, and Jamie became our first judge. Completing the duo was artist, sculptor and fashionista Sadie Clayton, who brought artistic rigour, brilliant energy and a completely different creative eye.

The combination of tide tables and Iain Stirling’s diary meant filming in May. On a Scottish beach. What could possibly go wrong?

A couple of training days before filming, West Sands disappeared beneath a spectacular blanket of sea haar (sea fog). Locals assured us the good weather was coming, we chose to believe them and thankfully, they were right.

From the outset, we wanted Race Against the Tide to be as sustainable a production as possible. West Sands isn’t simply a beautiful beach, its dunes form part of an internationally important and protected environment within the Firth of Tay and Eden Estuary. Production Exec. Angela Smith and the team worked closely with local authorities and conservation teams to ensure our temporary set and production village could coexist sensitively with the beautiful landscape.

Zinc’s post-house, Bumblebee, supplied an eight-camera operation and video village with eco-friendly generators running on recycled oil helped power the shoot. And then there was our competition. Five tonnes of sand per team. Hundreds of gallons of seawater. No plastic buckets or spades. No giant studio build. No skips full of scenery when filming finished. Just sand and water. And at the end of every episode, the tide came in and wiped the whole beach clean. We reckon it might just be the greenest entertainment format in the world.

At 4am on Day One, we arrived on West Sands at high tide and from that moment, the clock was running. As the water retreated, the beach became our studio floor. Our teams had six hours to turn mountains of sand into extraordinary works of art. And then, whether we were ready or not, the sea was coming back. There is something wonderfully focusing about making television when there is absolutely no possibility of running over. No “we’ll grab another take.” No “can we have ten more minutes?” The tide doesn’t care. So, we approached the whole thing almost like a live production.

From our multicamera gallery in a beach hut, our teams followed the action across West Sands, Camera operators led by DOP Tom Webster, story producers overseen by Senior Producer Carlin Wallace, sound operators led by Merlin Bonning, runners, beach marshals, our enormous Sand Crew – and an ever-growing collection of intrigued St Andrews locals and their dogs.

Central to it all was our brilliant presenter Iain Stirling. Keeping seven teams motivated, delivering the format, finding the stories, firing out an alarming number of sand puns and occasionally looking towards the North Sea to guesstimate how long we had left. As the water turned and the clock stopped, we were witness to some genuinely extraordinary pieces of art.

There is something beautifully ridiculous about spending months in pre-production, assembling hundreds of people, shifting tonnes of sand, rigging seven cameras and creating spectacular pieces of art, knowing that by teatime almost all physical evidence of it will have disappeared. But that’s also what makes Race Against the Tide special. It’s big entertainment with the simplest ingredients imaginable: sand, sea, creativity and jeopardy and it’s a joy to finally share with the BBC audience.