Secret Agent Selection WW2, interview

One of the contestants in ‘Secret Agent Selection WW2’, Debbey Clitheroe, has been so kind to write a bit about what the experience was like for her and answer some of my questions.
It is wonderful to have this insight into one of these shows and hear about some of the exiting future plans our agents have.
Of course a lot that was in the show ended up on the cutting room floor, but it is a shame, hearing about what the students went through makes it clear that the experience was even more impressive than what we saw on television.
I’m even more impressed now.

Debbey Clitheroe;
Selection process was through a variety of mediums. Firstly they sent paperwork to be filled in, this was followed by a telephone interview, a Skype interview and then an invitation to London to undergo tests and have a meeting with a director and a psychotherapist. It took a few months from the start of the process until the final decisions were made.
We were away for around 3 weeks.

We handed in all mobile devices prior to being taken to the train station. We had absolutely no contact with the outside world. From the moment we left the hotel to go to the train station to the time we returned home, we were completely immersed.

We slept in the dorms in our 1940’s pyjamas most nights. The only nights we didn’t were when we built our own bivy’s in the forest, slept under tree roots and slept out in the old timber yard. The night we slept out in the forest, I wish had been included in the final edit.
The only radio we listened to was the period one that relayed messages from Churchill, the newspapers were all from that same period. We had absolutely no idea what was going on in the modern day.

There were no breaks, no cuts or re-shoots. The way in which it was recorded was that the crew were basically filming us all being put through the training. There were no scripts for us at all. Everything was “real” in the sense that we were exhausted, hungry (all we had to eat was the rationed food from the era). If we fell, cried, laughed, messed up it was recorded as was, nothing altered. If the cameras ever stopped, the training didn’t, we were still living in the era.

By the second week, our conversations were all about how training was going, how we felt we were doing if we had the energy to talk. Mostly, we were too caught up in the actual training, there were rarely ever any breaks.
We were up first thing every morning for PT with Staff, then battledress on, breakfast and out on the lawn to start whatever the day brought.
We were never told in advance what we would be doing, just 5 minutes to be ready with a full water canteen. We were out until it turned dark and some days we did not return until the next day where we had a quick change, some days we were told that we did not have time to even wash! Just a quick change and then onto the next phase of training.

There was only one evening that we had a break and we were all so tired and wary by then that we tested each other on our morse. We were on edge, waiting to be dragged off into the middle of the night for more training. We did not relax once. We read training manuals if we had any spare minutes, we were constantly testing each other on the colours of the time pencils, the types of fuses and bomb making.
We never once spoke about our modern day lives. I never once felt homesick or missed my family, which I believe was because we had to concentrate so much on everything that we were being taught there was just no time to think about anything else.

On top of that, Rod Bailey, the historian handed us SOE files of some of the real agents for us to read through. I remember being in the room I shared with Magda and Charlotte, I was handed Violette Szabo’s file and asked to share it with the others. Lizzie and Rohini were there, all sat on what had been Charlottes bed. I remember reading it out loud and as I reached the part detailing how she had been executed, the words stuck in my throat. I had never heard of the SOE prior to then. I read the last paragraph and there was just silence in the room from ourselves and the crew as we took in the reality and enormity of what I had just read. Without saying a word, we knew we had to fight to make it through to the end of our training. To honour these brave, amazing women we were finding out about. There was so much that was not included that I wish had been. Moments like this, with the file would have helped give the viewer a sense of what we were also dealing with emotionally.

Prior to the show, we had a lady come along and show us briefly how to put our hair up and the we were left to our own devices during filming. We had only a comb, hair pins a hair net and a 1940’s styling spray plus 5 minutes, if that, in a morning to get ready!

Yes, the wireless set was real and we had to learn very quickly how to set it all up and how to rig the aerial in order to send and receive.
It was nerve wrecking once you had sent a message as you then had to wait for a certain time to receive a response to know if your message had been received. I cannot tell you what a relief and how amazing it felt once we received the response. It was such a tense time, sat out in the woods, waiting, all our senses on high alert. There was one time, I think it was included in the final edit where myself and Samy were sat waiting for the message response, Alastair was with the aerial and Magda was on lookout. A twig cracked nearby and myself and Samy just held our breath. We thought we had been found, it was that intense, we were just so immersed.
On the final mission, it was even worse, we had to be successful with the morse. What you didn’t see was that when I was out on my own scouting for a tree, the Colonel stepped out in front of me, as a French Gendarmes and questioned me on my own. He searched my bag but luckily I had the map inside my bra. I was so scared, even though I knew it was the colonel, I did not want to put my team in jeopardy. I managed to talk my way out of a sticky situation and was allowed on my way. I had picked some flowers and said I was on my way to the crematorium.

On this mission, we also encountered enemy fire which also was not shown. This was scary, we felt like we were actually running for our lives.
We rigged the tree with the dummy explosives but then they were replaced with real explosives put together exactly as we had to determine if ours would have worked. As you saw, we blew our tree up, we were elated. We were hugging each other and saying that’s it, no German Panzer division is getting through there! It was that real, at that time, in that moment that is how we felt.

We are still in touch. We have attended a few SOE events together, a few of us went to a London Blitz party. I went over to Germany to visit Ravensbruck. I also went over to Valencay for the SOE memorial where I met Noreen Riols and was asked to read some of the names from the memorial. Also, myself, Rohini and Lizzie went over to Auschwitz together.

A group of us girls have come up with a bit of a plan for this year. We are going to use the real SOE agents that the programme paired us with and we are going to recreate some of the journeys they took on their missions in France. We intend to do the journeys using mainly bicycles and we are going to blog our journeys. The plan is to travel to France together and then split off on our separate agent mission recreations and see if we can do it.

Thank you Debbey for being so kind to answer my questions and give us a look behind the curtains of how this show was made.

I am glad that some of my cynical ideas about where the show may have taken a few shortcuts, were wrong.
I blame all those other shows where contestants do get breaks and have access to mobile phones and so on!

Having read Debbey’s story I have to say I’m even more jealous of not having taken part.