“It’s about as serious as an emergency call gets”: Alone Australia EP on Mike’s scary call for help

It’s the call she’d been hoping never to receive.

But in Wednesday night’s episode of Alone Australia, after 60 year-old Resilience Coach Mike experienced chest pains and was forced to use an emergency satellite phone to phone for help, Executive Producer Riima Daher knew she needed to act fast.

Her quick thinking might just have saved the contestant’s life.

“It’s the call you prepare for, but pray you’ll never get,” Daher told Perth Now.

“And it was genuinely terrifying.”

In the first episode of the second season of SBS’ gruelling survival series, contestant Mike, who is the oldest in this year’s series, is pictured experiencing chest pains.

Later that evening he makes a frantic call, audibly struggling to draw breath.

“There was justified distress in Mike’s call for help and then in all of us who heard it,” said Daher, who oversees production on the hit series, and who was across the emergency dash to Mike’s location on New Zealand’s South Island during filming for the show.

“Chest pains are alarm-triggering symptoms under the best of conditions, and he was out in the freezing cold in the middle of nowhere, audibly suffering, with no idea what was happening to him and genuinely afraid for his life — as then were we.

“It’s about as serious as an emergency call gets.”

There are extensive emergency procedures in place should an event such as this take place — Daher and her team sprang to action.

“When an emergency call comes through, we become a TV production second and an emergency response team first,” she said.

“The medic becomes the executive in charge and we all fall in line behind them.

“There’s a whole rehearsed system of protocols that get actioned by every individual involved, all piloted by our Head of Safety.”

At the end of the episode, a boat is seen speeding towards Mike’s location across a lake in a remote part of New Zealand’s South Island.

“(We had an) experienced skipper with years of first responder experience on that lake, at night and in the worst of conditions,” Daher explained.

“The big unknown was whether we’d find him on the land once we landed.”

SBS are keeping what transpires a closely guarded secret, but the drama will continue when Alone Australia returns for its second episode next Wednesday.

Alone Australia screens 7.30pm, Wednesday, on SBS.