Tribal Markings

For five years now, a war for survival has been fought between gangs of teenagers after an apocalyptic disaster. Meet some of The Tribe...

Touring Britain with some cast members from The Tribe is like touring with a rock band, according to the show's publicist. Fans have been queuing for hours for autogrpahs, screaming at the actors as if they were pop stars and chanting the tribal mantra 'power and chaos'. It's a phenomenal reaction for a show tucked away at Saturday lunchtime on Five.

...in the beginning, many of the waifs and strays wandering the post-apocalyptic urban landscape gathered together to take shelter in an abandoned shopping mall. They became the Mall Rats, the hero tribe.

One of the key characters in that first series was Amber, who was a mother figure for many of the children living there. After a year of falling in love with Bray, she dissapeared, not to be seen again until the third series. This was all because, as actress Beth Allen explains, she wanted to concentrate on her school exams. "I thought I was thoroughly dead. I went off and did my school thing and got the call a year later. They said, 'Do you want to come back?' I was like, 'Yeah, alright, this will be interesting'. It wasn't a hard decision to make at the time, but when they went on and did series two, they all seemed to be having such a good time and I was stuck back at school doing boring things. But it really worked out in the end because I managed to get my exams done and then make my way back into the series."

Relationships between the characters lie at the heart of The Tribe. And boy, have they been turbulent. There have been two babies, several weddings and a lot of kissing. For the young actors, those intimate moments provoke a lot of discussion. "It's really an odd situation because it's really one of the more intimate things you can do with someone, but it's also your job." says Beth, whose character, Amber, had a long-term relationship with Bray (Dwayne Cameron). "I think it was made easier by the fact that Dwayne and I worked really well together. We had quite a good on-screen dynamic."

Sadly with Dwayne Cameron deciding to leave The Tribe after three years to pursue other acting projects, Amber was left with the baby. Literally, "It was quite good fun actually, because it happened really fast. They got about episode 47 or 48 at the end of the series and we kind of realized she wasn't particularly pregnant and needed to be very pregnant because she was about to have a baby in four episodes' time! So I went through about six months of pregnancy in about four episodes. I had all this padding under my costume and I was running into walls and bouncing off people. It was one of the hardest things I've done because you're really unprepared for it. If you haven't had a baby you just have no idea."

With the birth of Baby Bray, Beth often has to act with a real-life infant on set. "We figured out very quickly that there was no point in trying to do scenes with him if he was tired or grumpy or hungry. We found ways of getting him over and done with in about 20 minutes and then we send him home. You can see in some of the scenes it's like, 'Oh God!', I'm holding him really awkwardly because he's really behaving awkward. There's a couple of scenes in the bloopers where he's screaming his lungs out and we're trying to get the scene done and they're like 'Keep going' and we're all talking normally and there's this really loud pitched screaming - and those things really scream!"

This year's Tribe tour to Europe has lasted more than a month and taken in personal appearances across Germany and Britain. So, once the fans have queued more than four hours to meet them, what is it they want to know ? "The top three questions I get are: Does it hurt to have your hair that way ? Is there going to be a series six ? And is Bray coming back ?" says Beth. And the answers ? "No, it doesn't hurt; I don't know, but it's looking pretty positive for a sixth series; and there's always a possibility Bray could return." "In The Tribe, nobody is ever ruled out from coming back," adds Tom. "Exactly," agrees Beth. "Danny and I are testament to that."