If Patrick Harrison was surprised to find a BBC engineer with an electrical lead on the doorstep of his terraced house in Skipton, he didn't show it.

We have a strong relationship with our viewers on Working Lunch.

Your e-mails, letters and calls help us to break all sorts of stories.

But Patrick went one step further - he helped us to get our report on air.

Breakdown

When the generator broke down on our outside broadcast van on Wednesday, there were just 15 minutes to go to broadcast.

We were all set up inside a dental surgery with an item about the Office of Fair Trading's decision to investigate the dentistry market when everything went dead.

The generator powering our links with London had overheated and would take eight hours to cool down again.

Without another source of electricity we wouldn't get on air.

Door to door

That's when our intrepid engineer Bobby leaped out of the van, and ran up and down the street we were parked in desperately knocking on doors.

It was Patrick who answered our distress call, cheerfully inviting us to plug into his mains.

The van roared back into life with just three minutes to go before the programme started.

As a report, the dentists story turned out to be a model of what we try to achieve on Working Lunch.

Quick to react

The news of an OFT investigation into private dentists had only broken an hour before.

It was a national announcement, made in London.

We interviewed the Director General of the OFT but we based our report in the foothills of the Yorkshire Dales, gauging reaction from a typical private dentist's surgery.

Better still we'd been invited there by the dentist himself.

Your contibution

That dentist was Andy Bates, another Working Lunch viewer.

He had become fed up with television coverage of the issue and wanted to put his side of the story, so e-mailed us an invite.

It's amazing how useful those e-mails are.

Often they point out stories that no-one has covered.

Your questions

Equally they can be a great help in interviews.

In the previous week, when talking to the managers who had taken over the Viasystems factory in South Shields, I was able to put questions from viewers who'd worked at the factory.

They had e-mailed us with concerns about their pensions and the way they'd lost out on redundancy payments.

Whenever we appeal for viewers to recommend stories we get a tremendous response.

This week in West Yorkshire we had ideas covering every sector of the economy from internet companies to an invite to cover the regeneration of a former mining village.

So please, if you have an idea, jot it down and email it into us at: [email protected].