I have no shame confessing that I’d be a crap companion during the apocalypse. My practical skills are limited, I’d be a right Debbie Downer and I don’t respond well to sharing food. Still, last November, two survival experts spent a morning making a valiant effort to prepare me for Armageddon deep in the rural Indiana countryside.
I had ventured to the US midwest to see the making of Apocalypse, an ambitious new Channel 4 reality series: an eight-parter following 16 people attempting to sustain themselves after an unexplained catastrophe from which only they appear to have survived. I was to experience the abridged version: my training only lasted a couple of hours, whereas the real participants will get three days of prep. They’ll then have to endure a month in the doomsday simulation.
I only had to muddle on until dinnertime. After an hour spent in a gravel-pit junkyard, I could (theoretically) build a shower and make a torch with scavenged items. I’d learned how to open a tin of pilchards sans can opener (thwack it on concrete) and to start a fire without a lighter or matches (twigs, maybe?).
Induction over, I was blindfolded and bundled into a minivan. We stopped, and I was shoved out, just as the show’s participants would be. As I peeled off my mask, I saw for the first time the extraordinary location in which Apocalypse is set: a thousand-acre abandoned town comprising hundreds of individual buildings.
The fictional town of Riverside wasn’t built from scratch for the show. The production took over Muscatatuck Urban Training Center, about 70 miles west of Cincinnati, a site usually used by police and military groups to train in urban warfare. There were no Big Brother-style CCTV cameras on set; kitting out the vast site would be impossible.
Instead, a small team of producer-directors would live among Riverside’s residents, documenting every moment. Out there in Riverside on my own, in a state of mild peril, I started to explore. I walked past burnt-out vehicles and the remnants of a tanning salon; a multistorey car park and a smashed-up cop car.
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