That Arctic research station in the BBC thriller Vigil? It's really a Kia car showroom on the edge of Glasgow

The new series of the BBC thriller Vigil has been intriguing millions with its dramatic story of a British special forces agent murdered in a remote research station, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle.

But what viewers don't know is that the laboratory – supposedly on the inhospitable Svalbard archipelago – was actually recreated in a Kia car showroom on the edge of Glasgow.

While stars Suranne Jones and Rose Leslie did spend six days filming in the isolated, icy outpost halfway between Norway and the North Pole, it proved a lot easier to shoot most of the action 1,600 miles away in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire.

Producer Marcus Wilson said: 'Our biggest challenge was creating a believable world on screen. We wanted people to feel like they were there. 

'So there was lots of clever joining [of] the scenes where you start a scene in Svalbard and we then go into an environment in Glasgow, which feels like we're still there. We use a lot of technology, CGI, to blur the joins even more.'

Svalbard's temperatures in winter – where the sun does not rise for four months – can drop to -20C, and even in its four months of continual daylight, the mercury rarely rises above 8C.

Ms Jones, 48, who plays DCI Amy Silver, said: 'Svalbard was amazing, so beautiful. We were filming in such remote locations. There were reindeer outside the breakfast room every morning, we got to drive the snow buggies, and we really had to layer up.

'We tried some moose and reindeer, which is part of the local cuisine – I had moose stew!

'The problem was when we got back to Glasgow we were too hot because we still had to film with all our layers on.'

Other interior shots were filmed at Stirling University while a quarry in Shotts, North Lanarkshire, also doubled as the Arctic landscape – with some exterior shots filmed at the real scientific research unit Unis Svalbard in Longyearbyen.

Producers sought help with the challenges of shooting in the harsh landscape from experts who worked with Tom Cruise on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which also filmed scenes in Svalbard.

'They really knew the territory,' Wilson said. 'It was this kind of interesting dynamic. They would go, "Well, on Mission: Impossible, we did this..." and I'm like, "Okay, we want it to look like that, but we have a fraction of their budget, so, what's the clever way of doing that?"

'We wanted a Svalbard that felt bespoke to Vigil.'

Vigil has become one of the BBC's most successful dramas of recent years. The first series, in 2021, focused on a murder on board nuclear sub HMS Vigil. It attracted around 12 million viewers and was nominated for a Bafta.

Series two aired in 2023 and revolved around a deadly drone attack and was one of the BBC's most-watched dramas of the year.

This series delves into international politics and espionage as the UK, America, Russia and China compete for control of the Arctic and its resources.

Vigil continues on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday.