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Twenty Twelve plus one

Roger Mosey|11:08 UK time, Monday, 18 April 2011

There'll be a gap in our viewing from this week as Twenty Twelve comes to the end of its run on BBC Four.

But there's good news for its devotees, who include most of our office and quite a number of our colleagues over at Locog.

The BBC has announced there'll be a second series, and you can read the press release - including an exclusive quote from head of deliverance, Ian Fletcher.

No series is perfect, and Twenty Twelve had its critics including one of our distinguished bloggers.

But as a declared fan myself, I thought its range of characters and the writing were definitely heading for medal status - and it would have been bonkers not to commission another run given the audience figures and the buzz created by series one.

Cast of BBC comedy Twenty Twelve

In one of those great spontaneous vox pops that sometimes happens, I heard two twenty-somethings exchanging their favourite lines from the show on the tube home from Arsenal v Liverpool - and it's further reassurance that it tickles the funny bone well outside the Olympic village.

What Twenty Twelve illustrates is that the creative departments of the BBC - in this case our in-house comedy team - are busy thinking about how they can tie in with the Olympic story.

In the past few weeks, we've been dealing with everything from drama and documentary to children's programmes and music and I'm now pretty confident that there'll be some really promising stuff on screens and radios between now and the Games.

Inevitably, a number of early ideas have fallen by the wayside, but what's coming through should have enough impact to do justice to the external events of 2012.

These proposals are, of course, on top of what you might call the 'core curriculum' - the commitments we've made to the sport, the news and the cultural coverage in the next 18 months.

Here, too, the planning is into a highly detailed phase and some of it will become public soon.

We'll hear much more, for instance, about the Olympic torch relay by early summer this year and then 27 July 2011 marks one year to go to the opening ceremony - with special coverage currently being discussed.

I said in my very first blog in this space that pacing ourselves was key and we'd be guided by audience interest as we planned for 2012.

That is clearly starting to build, with evidence ranging from the millions of ticket requests, to the growing popularity of shows like Twenty Twelve and greater involvement with Olympic-related news stories.

Nobody wants to batter people into submission by the sheer volume of what we offer but helping the right ideas to come through is one of the pleasures of this job - and you'll hear about more of them here in the coming months.

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