Clip of ITV's new drama reveals Nessie prank secrets

THE stunning, haunting shores of Loch Ness is being showcased in a new six-part ITV drama, The Loch.

Laura Fraser, as Annie Redford and Siobhan Finneran as DCI Lauren Quigley. Picture: ITV

And after the first episode was screened on Sunday night, a behind-the-scenes clip released by ITV reveals how their gruesome Loch Ness Monster joke was staged.

The new series began with a huge prank from a number of the town’s teenagers where is is suggested the ‘carcass’ of Nessie had been washed up on the shores of Loch Ness.

The clip reveals the ‘monster’ was made up of real animal bones, which had to be sterilised, as well as offal.

Production designer Andy Harris said: “The Plesiosaur is made up of a variety of different animals.

“When I went to the prop store there was just this awful smell of boiling bones and gristle.”

Producer Alan J Ward added: “They designed and built this skeleton that’s twenty odd feet long.”

The production staff said that a dog walker found the structure the following morning, believing it to be real.

The producer said: “We filmed on it during the daylight hours and the following day we filmed on it at night.

“It was too big and too complicated to take it away so we had to put tape round it and security on it over night.

“Unfortunately for us a dog walker arrived in the morning not knowing that it was a film set and it was in the newspaper headlines: Nessie’s dead.”

ITV’s new series is being branded the new Broadchurch, the channel’s successful crime drama.

It stars Laura Fraser, from The Missing, as local cop Annie Redford and Siobhan Finneran, of Happy Valley, as her new partner, the no-nonsense outsider Lauren Quigley.

Like Broadchurch, it is aimed to keep the audience guessing over who is the killer.

In a community nourished and sustained by myth and bordered by untamed nature, the search for a serial killer becomes a matter of life and death for local detective Annie Redford who is trying to cope with her first murder case.

When the body of local man Niall Swift is found at the foot of Carn Mohr Mountain and an isolated human heart on the loch shore, the town’s normality is shattered and the nightmare begins.

Chillingly, the beautiful scenery, undulating Highlands and vast expansive loch becomes a character in it’s own right adding a haunting depth to the community’s plight.

The Loch will introduce Annie and her family – husband Alan, a tour boat operator on the loch and their only child Evie, who at 18, is about to leave home for Australia.

The Redford’s are an ordinary loving family with an ordinary set of problems, yet the pressure of a murder investigation will undermine their stability and create tensions that threaten to disrupt and destroy their lives together.

Within the tightly knit community, several local characters will come under suspicion as the monster lurking in their midst begins to terrify and rock the village to its core.

Forensic profiler, Blake Albrighton, will assist on the case offering insights borne from the last four cases he’s helped crack with his distinctive way of working.

The six-part series is on ITV every Sunday at 9pm.