How to make a 'Frozen Four'

Two days before lift off we're in a planning meeting for our hastily arranged "Arctic Season" when our foreign editor, Deborah Rayner, has one of her brilliant brainwaves and cries out "why don't make an icy '4 logo' to plant in the Arctic"?!

Wonderful, we all think, but it's never going to work - we park it in the back of our brains and got on with the important job of fixing the trip itself. Did we have enough access? Did we have good enough interviews? Were we going to be warm enough? Would the equipment work?

And, crucially, could we even broadcast live from the High Arctic? (Anywhere above 70 degrees north is considered the High Arctic and we were attempting to broadcast from 78 degrees north)

Fast forward on 24 hours, its a Saturday, myself and the Foreign Editor are in the office trying to put the final planning touches to the trip when Channel 4 News director, Martin Collett, walks past.

Now, for those of you who don't know, Martin Collett is a "can do" kinda guy. No problem is surmountable, no hairbrained idea is too off the wall. So Deborah asks Martin if he thinks we could make a "Frozen 4". Martin ponders briefly but concludes it can be done.

Off he goes to the airfix store (or some such place) and picks up some structured foam and perspex rods. He spends the rest of the weekend painstakingly creating an unbelievable model.

He glues it and waterproofs it and even makes it anti-stick. The instructions come down. Only use purified water (tap water has impurities which would make it cloudy). It may not work but if it leaks try putting small amounts of water in it and freezing it bit by bit so the ice forms its own seal.

So Wednesday comes around, we're going live on Thursday night, but we still don't have the "Frozen 4" sorted. We send Kallie, our fixer in Svalbard, off to buy vast quantities of bottled water and then onto the docks where he can secure access to a meat locker. Kalle disappears for a number of hours. The disappointing news filters back that its leaking badly. But we don't give up.

I get Kalle to bring the, by now, dripping mould to the hotel we're working in. I go and plead with the front desk "I know this is a very odd request but would you mind if I used your walk-in freezer for 24 hours or so?". But Svalbard is part of Norway so no request is too strange and people are more than willing to help so the woman at reception happily showed me to the meat locker, told the chefs and let me get on with it.

For the next 24 hours I nurse that "Frozen 4" like it was my own child - drip feeding it little bits of water every hour. Hoping it won't leak everywhere. Eventually it starts to take shape. I get all excited thinking how brilliant it would look in front of Jon Snow live from the High Arctic.

Considering how we could shoot opening shots through it. Then the moment of truth comes - and the question I was dreading - can we actually get it out of the mould?

We squeeze, we rip, we pull but this "Frozen 4" isn't in the mood for giving up its bounty. In the end we had to give up - but we did take a photo (see below) and learned that, next time around, we'd have to make sure the inserts were more easily removable!!!


The Frozen 'Four' logo with Jon Snow, Tom Clarke, Jane Kinney

Jane Kinney is the assistant home editor for Channel 4 News and helped produce our Cold Rush season from the Arctic.

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