‘Portrush Sea Rescue’, a 7x30min series that follows the work of the RNLI volunteers who crew the Portrush lifeboats, kicks off on UTV on Friday 20th June at 8pm.
The program, produced and directed by Iain Webster from Network Media, highlights the tireless work of the volunteers, a group of ordinary people with everyday jobs willing to drop everything and head to the lifeboats when their emergency pagers go off. The series was filmed from May – September 2007, with Webster living beside the lifeboat station for the duration of filming so he could be on site when the boats went out.
“The pagers can go off any time of the night or day,” Webster told IFTN. “Portrush Sea Rescue has two main lifeboats – a smaller, inshore boat and an all weather life boat called the Katie Hannon. On the smaller boat, I secured a camera at the front looking inwards to capture the crew’s reactions and the lifeboat driver wore a helmet camera. On the Katie Hannon had a number of ‘lipstick cameras’ installed, but this boat didn’t go out as often.”
The series offers first hand footage of several dramatic sea rescues - from two young children and their father whose body boards are swept out to sea in Portrush’s West Bay, to a full scale air, sea and land rescue operation searching for a five year old child who disappeared on a family day out.
Webster, an established video journalist, has produced programs for BBC2, ITV, Discovery Channel and PBS. His credits include reality series ‘Derek’s Dreams’ and documentary ‘Omagh – The Legacy’. He is currently working on a follow-up documentary ‘Omagh – The Legacy: Ten Years On’, that revisits the families affected by the Omagh tragedy in 1998.
‘Portrush Sea Rescue’ kicks off on Friday 20th June at 8pm on UTV.