Inside TV’s most hellish show: ‘We didn’t eat any food for four days’

What’s the first thing you’d do in an apocalypse?

Run to the mountains? Raid the nearest supermarket? Just curl into a ball and cry?

Channel 4’s newest reality TV show, the aptly titled Apocalypse, is the closest television can possibly get to finding out what would really happen to a pack of ordinary humans at the end of days. It’s easily the most extreme reality TV show since Bear Grylls: The Island, but without the paradisal beaches and crystal waters.

Instead, two teams are abandoned in a deserted town that appears to have been decimated, totally unaware of each other’s existence. They have no food, water or energy supply, just the company of strangers with varying levels of useful skills. They must survive 28 days on their own with no help or guidance to make it through to the end.

Louise Baker is a mechanic and key member of the Eastside team. She’s a single mum, and the epitome of a doer. ‘I do loads of DIY,’ she tells me. ‘I’m not talking a bit of painting, I dug out 20 tonnes of soil in my garden and laid down a s**tload of slabs, and built a 23 foot summer house.’

On the very first day of filming, Louise fell. The crunch of her nose hitting the floor is one of the opening moments of Apocalypse, an immediate indication that this show is not for the faint-hearted. ‘I actually think I broke it a little bit,’ she says, a year after filming. ‘I can feel a bit of gristle there.’

Undeterred though, Louise ploughed on. We’re speaking after the fourth episode has aired and I don’t yet know if she’ll make it to the end, but so far only one contestant has dropped out, and that was due to tensions with her teammates rather than crumbling under the perilous conditions. If I were a betting man, I’d say that Louise will be among the survivors still standing after 28 days.

However, it gets much harder than we’ve seen so far, which is saying something. The two teams have been at war since they first became aware of each other. The Eastside found chickens first; the Westside subsequently stole them. From there it was game on: unbearably limited supplies of food were snatched by rivals, when some people had already gone three days without food. If the animosity between teams, and often even within them, wasn’t challenging enough, their health and mental wellbeing were genuinely shot.

‘I don’t know how much I can say, but one of the girls passed out through not eating enough food,’ Louise anxiously recalls. 

‘We didn’t eat any food for four days, and it was on the second day we found our water. At one point, I got out of bed, went to the toilet, and I couldn’t walk any more than five steps. My body was literally shutting down, saying, “You can’t, you can’t do this, you need some fuel and energy.” But my head was saying, “Oh yeah, let’s go and run a marathon.”’

Casting a show like Apocalypse comes with so many complicated layers. Obviously, the priority is making good television first and foremost. Anyone can be hurled into the Big Brother house, but for this show in particular, a specific set of skills among the teams was essential too.

The responsibility to find the perfect contributors fell on casting director Kerry Plant. ‘I always ask myself if I was at a dinner party, who would I want to sit next to? We had a really good brainstorm of practical skills we had to make sure they knew for them to say the duration of the show,’ she says.

Louise is a mechanic, her skillset pretty clear from the get-go. Others came into their own through the process, like theatre director Bertie, who surprised everyone, producers included, with DIY talent so remarkable he was able to build a fully functioning shower with whatever scraps he could find lying around.

Applicants may have talked the talk, but securing people who would actually be able to mentally and physically go the distance is a whole other challenge altogether.

’It’s about asking questions about their life, their background and what they’ve gone through,’ says Kerry. ‘I talk to them honestly about their expectations of the whole experience – not just the surviving 28 days but also what it’s like to be on TV – the good, the bad, and the ugly of it. 

‘We had a robust selection process for them, and then we kept an eye on them when they were there, always knowing what people were doing and how many calories a day, on average, they were eating.’

Louise reveals she lost over a stone in weight, so who knows how much more it would have taken to pull someone out of the process. But she’s keen to stress that while production wasn’t always visible, they knew they were always safe, with regular health checks assuring them they were, by some miracle, still stable enough to continue.

But watching Apocalypse, the biggest discomfort comes from the other contributors. Anger between the rival teams is so ferocious that at times it becomes quite terrifying to watch as they stomp around the town with baseball bats, plotting revenge with genuine malice and a pure rage I haven’t seen on television since Kim Woodburn was escorted out of the Celebrity Big Brother house by security.

‘There was a certain point where we were like, okay, we need this to calm down, and we were thinking we don’t know how we’re going to do it,’ executive producer Jo Harcourt-Smith tells me. 

‘But what makes Apocalypse so different and extraordinary is normally TV shows can plan out what’s going to happen on day 12 or 10 with an elimination here or a challenge, but other than rescue on day 28 and new arrivals coming in, it was a bit of an unknown.’

Very quickly, theft becomes completely normal. The aforementioned chicken stealing sets the tone for the month ahead. Next it’s Spam straight out of a cupboard, then a pair of goats are snatched despite a clear warning sign beside them that reads: do not touch the goats unless you want to go to war.

Predictably, war becomes the preferred option.

Louise was one among the group of goat thieves. Even now, she has zero remorse because the other side ‘took so much from us’. 

When I suggest the goats were the most substantial theft though, Louise defensively explains: ‘We didn’t steal anything else from them, they really screwed us over. The goats weren’t theirs and they took so much from us – the goats were ours and rightfully ours.’

Watching the misery of Apocalypse, the main question I come back to time and time again is why anyone would put themselves through this? There is no prize pot or chance of celebrity on the other side. Is the glory alone really worth it? Isn’t climbing Machu Picchu or running the Hackney Half marathon infinitely more appealing? 

But even after watching the hellscape, more than 7,500 people have already applied for a second series. ‘Everybody’s got an opinion,’ Jo says. ‘A lot of the cast for this series are on social media when the episodes go out, just responding to people who say “that looks easy” or “I could do better than that.” They’re just saying to them, “Apply then – put your money where your mouth is.”’

For Louise, it was incredibly personal. When she was approached on social media about the show, her dad had recently been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. It was terminal, and when she left for America to film, she didn’t know if it would be her final goodbye. It wasn’t, thankfully, but the weight of knowing he was in his final days was another burden she had to carry on top of the hunger, sleepless nights and insufferably cold temperatures that were so painful the teams all spooned each other every night for warmth.

‘My dad couldn’t eat any food and I thought, “God imagine”. I can’t imagine what it’s like to say that you can’t have a cream cake, you can’t have a diet Pepsi, you can’t go out for a meal, you can’t do anything at all.

‘There’s no way that I could have put myself into that position apart from doing this. It was the only way that I could try and resonate and understand what he was feeling was to do the show. A lot of people say, “I’ve done 48 hour fasting” and I’ve done that too, but it’s different because then you’ve still got the option to eat, you’ve still got the choice. In there, there’s no choice.’

I wonder whether if Louise knew quite how challenging it would be, she would have signed up. Did she know she’d be starved to dangerous levels, deprived of sleep for days, unable to shower or be comfortable at all, and resort to stealing from others?

‘I expected to go without nothing,’ she says. ‘We’re just so spoilt in this life. As much as people say that they think they don’t have anything, you have so much more than you think you have.

‘I go to the gym a lot, and when I run on a treadmill after 30 minutes trying to do a 5k, I feel like I’m done and can’t go on, but I end up running 10k. It’s the same as when you’re in there – just when you think you’ve got absolutely nothing else to give and you just want to go home, you’re probably only 10% done.’

Apocalypse is available to stream on Channel 4.