Wolfblood’s fifth year on CBBC recently began, but the show has changed a lot – at the end of the fourth year, the Wolfbloods “went public”, and now the world knows who they are. That’s created a whole new set of problems for the central characters, and show creator Debbie Moon chatted with Paul Simpson about the problems and possibilities the new format provides…

 

I really enjoyed the first episode of the new season – you’ve given yourself a new canvas to paint on this year.

Yes, I suppose I always thought that the secret would come out and we’d explore that. I didn’t have any firm timetable for it, and last season just felt like the right place for that to happen. And now of course we have this completely new world where everything is out in the open and we’re dealing with people’s reactions, which I suppose is quite topical in terms of immigration, terrorism and prejudice of all kinds. More topical perhaps than we intended to be when we started off on this – it was probably about March last year, we started developing ideas for this season.

At that few people really thought that Trump would be a viable candidate let alone president…

Pre-Brexit, pre-Trump – we were all thinking in a year’s time we’ll be writing all this ‘What if Trump had won’ sort of dystopia scripts…

And here we are and it seems like Panorama! As things developed across the summer, did the scripts alter in tone? Did it become an opportunity to deal with the issues?

I think most of the issues we were dealing with already; we felt we were writing a dystopian version of the world, but the outside world caught up with us to some extent. I think they were issues we were exploring but they’ve just become more pronounced in the real world.

What were the reactions from fans and CBBC to you making such a drastic change to the series at the end of last year?

It was very good. CBBC were very much on board with it; every year they’ve been saying to us “What can we do differently this year? How can we expand the world? How can we make the show a little bit different but still remain with the core of the idea?” They were very much on board.

The fans were very surprised at first but really embraced it as a way to deal with the new element of that world, and see the characters in new situations.

Shows like Doctor Who retcon any development like this…

Yes, everybody on Earth seems to have multiple amnesia by now. The number of times aliens invaded the Earth and when the Doctor comes back again, everyone’s forgotten. It’s kind of necessary for a show like that, and the continuity of Doctor Who is a lot looser of course than what we use.

That’s the understatement of 2017!

Well, it’s all timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly! You can fudge it to an extent in that show, which is perhaps one of the great things about it – you can almost get away with anything. But the primary reason for us to do it was to explore what happened next. It wasn’t so much about the last couple of scenes at the end of season 4, it was: everybody knows – now what happens? And that’s the really interesting stuff…

Are there storylines that you’d have liked to have done with the world still secret that are now blocked off, or do you feel you have mined that element as far as you can?

I think we’ve probably gone as far as we could. There could be Wolfbloods out there that are living secretly, so if we wanted to go out and do a story about living in secret we could create guest characters whose friends and neighbours don’t know. But yes, I feel we’ve come to an end, certainly with these characters, and gone as far as we could at that stage. It was time to move on and put them under a different kind of stress.

It’s also interesting for the characters who did know before the big reveal; their agency has disappeared to a certain extent. They were the keepers of the secret – how are they going to fit into this new world where everybody knows what was their big secret?

Yes, that’s quite an interesting question – having a secret makes you feel special and everyone has that secret, so you no longer have that special link in a way. That’ll be quite interesting to explore over the next few episodes how the human characters fit into this as well.

I loved the way Jeffries realised at the end of episode 1 that “it’s a trap” – okay, about half an hour after the rest of the world has caught up with it…

Yes, poor old Jeffries!

I did like the way he did the reaction to the spiked drink – it was one of the rare occasions on television where it really did look like somebody collapsing rather than fake-collapsing…

You have to say that about Mark Fleischmann – he really goes for things. If you say Jeffries is going to pass out he doesn’t do the graceful faint, thinking ‘I mustn’t hit my head’, he just does it. But all our actors are so dedicated – we ask them to do the most ridiculous things like run around on the school roof or run really fast through the woods, and they’re always up for it.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve asked them to do?

Weirdest? I don’t know about weirdest, but we’ve done a few dangerous stunts – there was that bit in season 4 where Emilia and Doctor Whitewood were dangling off the edge of a cliff in the wild. That was quite dangerous. I remember putting Rhydian up a tree at some point, which was great fun because you’ve got ropes and rigging and all that that you then have to hide. We have a great stunt team who ensure we do it all really safely.

When we spoke last, you were saying you hadn’t seen much of a change in the effects between seasons 3 and 4 with the change of effects house. Looking back at 4 and now at 5, are the effects slightly different, or is it just a question of evolution?

I think it’s just an evolution. When you take something to a new company they take it on board and do the best they can, but they’re learning too about what you want and the tone of the show. And of course it’s always been done on a really tight budget even against even other television shows, let alone Hollywood movies – but the audience don’t allow for that. We have to pick our battles in terms of the wolves: rather than showing them all the time, we show them occasionally and make them as good as they can.

There’s more interior shots now than there used to be.

I think the lighting becomes an issue indoors but I think they’re starting to get their head round that.

When you’re writing the show do you have that consideration at the back of your mind, or do you write what you want with the story and then look at it with a budgetary head on? Or are there a specific number of “wolf minutes” you can have?

I think we’re aware when we’re in the writers’ room. We suss out which episodes will have the wolves in and which won’t so there’s that. If you’re going to be writing an episode in which there aren’t any wolves, you’re going to know but in terms of exact minutes, that’s thrashed out as the script goes along. Sometimes there’ll be an episode where as ask “Do we really need this?” so we take a couple of “wolf minutes”, as it were out of a different episode where they have less of an impact. So there is a certain amount of horse-trading… wolf-trading going on!

It’s not as if you can do stock shots, because they tend to be in different places every time…

That was one of the things that I found interesting. When I first started writing Wolfblood I assumed that we would have stock shots to cut to but it is actually very difficult because they’re all in different locations, different lighting. It’s not as easy as pasting in a shot of a wolf. You have to think very carefully about what you want and what effect you’re getting from it.

There have been other wolf shows in the past such as Being Human; do you ever look back at them and think “we can do something on that line, but put our own spin on it”?

I don’t think we do really, because our stories really come out of the characters and the situations so much, and we’ve never been a conventional werewolf show. Being Human is a terrific werewolf show, but because it’s such a specific idea, the Wolfblood world, it’s quite difficult to take stuff out of other shows and do our own take.

I’m sure there’s stuff there subconsciously because we’ve all got the werewolf mythos running around in your head, and we’re drawing on that to an extent. But I don’t remember going to something and saying we could do that because it’s very much coming out of the characters for us.

Werewolf mythos is so vast; it’s not been codified like Stoker did with Dracula or more to the point, Hammer did with Dracula…(we won’t say the Twilight word!) so you have got a much wider canvas. Are you still adding rules to the world, or are you still within what you thought up four or five years ago?

I think every now and then somebody comes up with an idea and we’ll fit things in around it – like the comet in season 3 had an effect on Wolfbloods, things like that, so we modify rules in response to that.

I think the basic rules are fairly solid, but on the other hand they are just the basics so if something brilliant did come along which didn’t fit within that I think we’d have room to manoeuvre, which is quite useful.

I think when you’re writing a series you don’t want to codify everything too strictly at the beginning because things are always going to develop, you’re always going to have new ideas, and you want that room to manoeuvre.

Are there things you’ve done over the past five years you didn’t think you’d be able to?

I’m quite impressed that we’ve been able to do what we’re doing in season 5, really. It’s quite a political season; it’s very much about sociology and human nature and how we react to prejudice. It’s been really great – CBBC has just embraced that and said “sure, go for it, we’re really interested in exploring that” – so yes, Wolfblood has been a more grown up show than I’ve expected it to be allowed to be, and CBBC has always been behind that. Obviously it’s expressed in ways that will appeal to our core audience but I think we can tackle quite big universal themes within that.

Has your audience grown up with the show?

Yes, I think we have definitely got an audience that has stuck with us all the way through. We’ve always had slightly older fans – I’m always getting messages from fans who are saying “I was 16/17 when I started watching the show and I know I shouldn’t like it but I do…” It’s always appealed quite well to teenagers and now our younger fans are growing  up with it, which is great – but then we’ve got new fans coming in all the time.

I think it’s a show that has the grown-up psychological stuff for the older viewers and the running around in the woods and the fun for the younger kids. It does appeal quite well across ages.

And a sixth year – do you know where you would like to go?

Some things happen at the end of season 5 that will be interesting to explore. I can’t say anything more than that. It’s not quite such a big thing as the end of season 4 but there are some interesting developments around the end of season 5 that will take us off into some interesting places if we should get a sixth season.

And the fans always want to know – any chance of seeing any of the original characters back in this year?

Not this year, no; unfortunately the scheduling just has not worked out. This is the problem – we keep casting really good actors and they go off and do other stuff which is brilliant for them and for us, but it does mean that they’re quite busy when it comes round to filming. It’s really difficult to fit in even a cameo, but we are hopeful that one day we will have some sort of Wolfblood reunion…

It’ll end up being for Comic Relief!

That would be brilliant! I’d love to do a Comic Relief Wolfblood – that would be great fun.

The knowledge of the Wolfbloods is presumably worldwide, and not confined to the UK…

The news has travelled around the world.

Is that going to play into this year, or are we very much still Newcastle and surrounding area?

We’re basically Newcastle, really, for budgetary reasons, and that’s where our core characters are, and that’s the kind of thing the audience is invested in. They’re invested very much in our characters. There are references to the wider world and what’s going on elsewhere.

Particularly if things escalate – The War Against the Humans, which is flagged quite loudly in that first episode…

Yes it’s a title made up by Jeffries that comes back to haunt him across this series.

And the tattoo on the woman’s arm is obviously important…

That will be important across the next few episodes – I can say no more!

 

Wolfblood continues on Mondays on CBBC