PC help out BIG BROTHER DAVE SALTMAN reports


ONE of the many good things that Pitchcare provides us with is a regular number of enquiries from the TV, PR and film industry. Just in the last year or so we have been asked to provide products and/or services for a number of events including BBC’s Match of the Day, Granada TV’s Jericho, starring Robert Lindsey, and Channel 4’s Big Brother 7. The latest enquiry was for Big Brother.


Prior to the filming of their recent series, I was invited down to Elstree Studios to meet the Production Manager and Set Designers. Once the usual confidentiality agreements were signed, I was taken around the set and asked to work the best solution for the garden area to the set designer’s vision, which included a lawn and two grass armchairs. I went through the options with the team and they were very pleased when I said that we could prepare and lay the lawn in the final few days leading up to the show. Prior to this series, when real grass had been used, a local landscaper had laid normal garden sized rolls six weeks in advance of the show. This meant that the garden had to be boarded out every morning, and removed every evening, to allow the construction team to build the set. By the time the show went on air the lawn had required patching up and was already in a poor


10 state. So, the contract was awarded and I


brought in the services of Simon Hutton from Fineturf to supply and lay the turf and ‘grow’ two grass armchairs. The armchairs were made using


cardboard templates, put together at Simon’s yard in Lincolnshire, which were then filled with gravel and topped off with rootzone. Seed was supplied in the pack, but there was never going to be enough time to grow it, so we harvested some turf and covered the chair outlines using turf pins to fix them in place. The armchairs were built two weeks


before they were needed in the BB garden, so Simon had to keep them fed and watered to encourage rapid rooting into the rootzone. We chose some quality turf for the lawn and this area was cordoned off and maintained to a very high standard. This involved an additional fertiliser application, more regular mowing and a dose of growth retardant (Scotts Primo Maxx) to slow the turf ’s progress in the BB garden. I asked Peter Stewart at Linemark UK


to provide two identical templates of the Big Brother logo. The production team wanted us to paint the logo onto the lawn to correspond with the carpet design running through the house. Peter


produced two fantastic stencils in less than a week, both were about twenty square metres in size. The only other requirement was


rootzone. The whole house is built on top of an open water tank which was used for making naval war films in the fifties and sixties. Obviously the tank doesn’t allow for any drainage, so the garden had to be built up to avoid waterlogging. I had provisionally ordered 20 tons in advance from GSB Loams. A week before the show was due to go


on air, four of us arrived at Elstree studios at 7.00am; the turf lorry, with 200 square metres of big roll and the two armchairs, was there waiting, ready to unload.


Our first task was to wheelbarrow on


the rootzone to cover the thick clay and pebbles that littered the rough graded garden. We were going through the pile of soil


quicker than we had expected so I quickly got on the phone to Dave Goodjohn (GSB) who was able to source another 20-ton lorry load within an hour. While we barrowed in the soil, Simon and his mate used a pedestrian stone rake to level and consolidate the material. By lunchtime the lawn area was soiled and graded, ready for the turf. We boarded out a walk way and started


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