I Am What I Am, John Barrowman [smart ebook reader .txt] 📗

9 His adoration of Ianto.

10 His love for the Doctor (duh! Me too).

11 His ability to make impossible decisions under terrible pressure.

12 His ability to breathe underwater (forget I ever mentioned this).

During the filming of Torchwood ‘Children of Earth’, I experienced something I’ve been immune to for most of my career – paranoia. I felt this way because of a number of major and minor events surrounding that third season. First of all, early in the filming, the Hub quite literally came crashing down around me. The underground tunnels collapsed, the massive security door imploded, the autopsy room was buried under rubble, and the tower that reached up under the Millennium Centre sparked and shook and erupted into flares of flame and light.

The destruction of the Hub may have been called for in the script, but given my state of mind, I thought everything the Torchwood team – cast and crew – had worked to achieve since our first episodes had been obliterated with the trigger of some well-placed explosive squibs2 and a burst of brilliant pyrotechnics.3

Add to the annihilation of the Hub the fact that the number of episodes was reduced from thirteen to five for series three; the loss of Jack’s Vortex Manipulator, his Webley gun – oh, and the Range Rover; and the gradual shrinking of the Torchwood core cast from five to three to two; and what would you think if you were me? I believed I was witnessing the fall of the house that Jack built.

Torchwood series one first aired in October 2006 on BBC3. Burn Gorman, Eve Myles, Naoko Mori and I all had strong television credentials – Gareth David-Lloyd was our television virgin4 – but for each of us the fact that we were about to become part of a sibling of Doctor Who made us feel a bit like we were back at the beginning of our careers. There was a kind of giddy excitement about this new show and about the adventure we were now embarking upon.

When I first walked into the conference room at the BBC studios in Treforest – where Doctor Who was, and Torchwood was soon to be, filmed – I was a bit gaga. Everyone was packed around the table: the director of the first three episodes, Brian Kelly; the head make-up artist, Marie Doris (The Doris); Ray Holman, the costume designer; the assistant directors (ADs); the forty-two producers;5 and just about everyone from BBC Wales it was going to take to get this thrilling new show up and running.

Funny story 6 about our first director, Brian ‘the smelly’ Kelly (aka Boabie Stroaker 7). At the end of a long day’s shooting of one of the first ever episodes, he and I let the other actors go home; we decided we could finish off the scene with just him and me and a small crew. It was a scene inside the Range Rover. Sometimes, when there’s a lot of dialogue in a driving sequence, the car is put on a trailer to create movement and the crew essentially work from the outside of the trailer – hanging on for their lives. For this final shot, Brian sat in the back of the Range Rover and he started to feed me the lines. My line in reply was, ‘Simple clean-up operation.’

However, because Brian is Scottish, every time he fed me the cue – and he was rubbish at it, by the way – I kept saying my line in a corresponding Scottish accent. In the end, we’d have been much faster asking everyone to stay because things, I’m afraid, went downhill from there … with the crew clinging onto the trailer for dear life with every take.8

At the threshold of the conference room, I paused for a beat, taking in who was there, and then I stepped through the doorway. I was Captain Jack, this show’s number one, and although I was far from being a father figure to anyone around the table, I knew playing the lead in a BBC show of this calibre came with certain responsibilities. In fact, throughout each series since then, I’ve continued to take my leadership role seriously. If another cast member or someone on the crew has had an issue that needed to be raised with the producers, and he or she was not comfortable mentioning it him or herself, I’d always take it on and do my best to represent the person and his or her concern to the appropriate producer.

On the morning of that first read-through, Gareth was filling his plate at the small buffet with fruit, cheese and pastries. Eve, as my new leading lady, was introducing herself to some of the guest actors for that episode. She was beaming and when she spotted me, she waved me to the seat closest to her, Burn and Naoko. The atmosphere in the room was lively and energized. Although we were untested as an ensemble, the scripts were strong and we were all good at our jobs. However, we were very aware of the fact that not only would we have to prove ourselves with an audience, but also we’d need to prove ourselves with the BBC if we wanted to return for a second season.

We took our seats. Scripts were distributed. Gareth was dragged away from the snacks. Until a few minutes before we began, the two seats at the front of the room remained empty. Over the course of the next two series, and the many, many read-throughs in which I’ve participated since then, the final pair to take their seats became known fondly as ‘our Torchwood mum and dad’: Julie Gardner, Torchwood Executive Producer and, at that time, Head of BBC Wales Drama, and Russell T. Davies, Executive Producer and Torchwood’s creator (God, actually). Once they were seated, we’d begin reading through the scripts.9

Read-throughs are critical for actors because episodes are filmed in twos or threes and