Archives for November 2010

The Arthurian legends are ripe with tales of magic and prophecy, love and hate, courage and adventure. They have a large cast of exciting characters and enduring narratives.

As such, using them as a basis for ideas is a storyteller's dream. For centuries, every generation has had their own version of the legends and I feel proud to be continuing that tradition with Merlin.

Whilst we are constantly developing the series, we've always tried to stay true to the original ethos - to tell action adventure stories for all the family that are primarily about friendship.

That hasn't changed and hopefully never will as, underneath all the monsters and magic, it is the relationships between our core characters that give each episode its heart.

As co-producer, I have a hand in pretty much every stage of the production from story lining to post production.

Every day presents a new challenge, be it deciding what language a pixie should speak, to figuring out how we physically put a sword in a stone.

Sometimes the magic behind the scenes can be just as exciting as the magic on it - such as when the special effects boys mix up their various powders to create spectacular explosions.

Other times it is slightly more mundane - the perfect rat stew, for example, is made from microwaved burgers torn up and thrown into mushroom soup.

Whatever the solution to the problem, I love being able to see something I've nursed from an idea at storyline stage come to life many months later on screen.

When we were first given the green light to make Merlin, one of the biggest tasks we faced was finding a suitable Camelot for the exterior shots. The search for the perfect location went on for some time and took us all over the UK, but nothing was quite right.

We had to set our net a bit wider and eventually ended up in France at the Chateau De Pierrefonds.

Viollet-le-Duc's showpiece of medieval architecture is as fantastical as it is magical and it was obvious from the off that this was the perfect place for us.

However, there was never any question that we could shoot the entire show in France as it would be far too expensive, so instead we visit three times a year to film all of our big exterior scenes and set pieces.

The castle is huge and we are exceptionally lucky to be able to use pretty much any part of it that we want to. Rooms such as the Salle des Preuses - which doubles as our Throne Room - are just stunning, but equally fascinating are all the underground tunnels and dusty towers - the bits the public never get to see.

It can become quite spooky though when we are shooting at night and I wouldn't recommend getting lost on your own after hours...

The most demanding parts of the year are definitely when we are filming at the Château.

We run two units (what we call cast and crew together) in a day, which can mean shooting scenes from a mixture of up to six episodes.

Looking after a crew of over 200 alongside a cast of up to 20 principle actors and 100 supporting artists isn't ever easy. We have tight schedules and work long hours in all weathers so anything can happen.

However, when we're there, our home is a pretty village in Picardy, our office the castle. There are prosthetics, stunts, explosions, tournaments, croissants... it'd be a lie to say it wasn't fun.

I'm primarily on hand for all the cast and crew should they have any questions or queries about the scripts so work with everyone from costume and make up to directors and actors.

But I'm also a spare body and need to be willing to turn my hand to whatever is necessary, be that running a second unit shoot when the director is waylaid, rewriting dialogue at the last minute on set, playing nurse when people are ill, or making tea when there's no-one else to do it.

When we're not in France, we spend our time in Wales, split between the studios just outside Cardiff and various locations dotted about the countryside.

The reality of location shooting is anything but glamorous - 4.30am starts, thermals, smelly portaloos in the corner of a field - but it's always interesting.

We're fortunate that there are so many fantastic locations on our doorstep. From the ruins of Neath Abbey, to the wilds of Trefil, Merlin just wouldn't be the same without them.

They need to be pretty spectacular to stand up to the Château, but I'd say they more than hold their own.

I have always believed in what we were making, but nothing could have prepared me for the success of Merlin. I still find it exciting to overhear people in the street or on the bus talking about that week's episode.

Without a doubt the most exciting points of each series for me are when we take iconic moments from the legends and spin them in our own way, be that meeting Mordred for the first time or seeing Excalibur forged.

This series sees more of those moments than ever - Excalibur emerging from the lake, Guinevere being crowned Queen and, for those of you that haven't guessed, we are finally bringing together that infamous group of warriors, the Knights of the Round Table.

The formation of this special group marks a new era and I can't wait to start exploring where we can take them in the next series.

But first of all you need to see how this year plays out. The final two episodes are full of spine-tingling moments - I just hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Rachel Knight is the co-producer of Merlin.

Merlin is on BBC One at 7.45pm on Saturdays and repeated on BBC Three at 7pm on Mondays. For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

Series three of Merlin is available in full series catch-up in iPlayer until Saturday, 11 December.

Comments made by writers on the TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

The Foods That Make Billions is a fascinating three-part series, which grabbed my attention as it goes directly to the core issues which affect the development of markets for branded products from a very practical viewpoint.

I'm a senior lecturer in retail management and this new series is valuable to me from a teaching perspective because it brings alive a whole range of marketing concepts. The series encapsulates in moments many ideas, making theoretical principles easy to understand.

I'm also one of the academic consultants on the series, so have attended concept and production meetings, offered advice on the focus of the series, read transcripts and fact-checked the content.

The really exciting part was watching the rushes as this is when the programme really started to take shape. Each episode focuses on a different foodstuff - bottled water, yoghurt and cereal.

In the UK, we have clean water available on tap and yet we spend our hard-earned cash buying two billion litres of bottled water every year. The food industry has become very adept at repackaging basic commodities and selling them to us to make significant profits.

Episode one, Liquid Gold, looks at many core branding concepts and draws us into the unfolding story of the development of the multi-billion dollar market of bottled water.

In the programme, Professor Richard Wilk, who teaches anthropology at Indiana University, makes the point that in the past, water was blessed by holy people and given power. Now he says the power is bestowed on water by corporations, governments, celebrities and brands.

The question of whether water has mystical connotations is interesting. Water is an essential commodity - without it you die. So there are perhaps rational arguments for raising water up to a holy status.

Liquid Gold shows how entrepreneurs and multinational corporations like Nestle, Evian and Coca Cola have turned this naturally occurring and life-saving drink into successful brands, and arguably encourage us to worship the brand by drinking bottled water - as if part of a new religion - daily during work, exercise and relaxation.

Is it immoral to build mega brands of bottled water while parts of the world are dying of thirst? Not having access to water is wrong in a world of excess, but so is not having food to eat, a place to work and earn a living, and a safe place to live.

Successful use of marketing and branding techniques has helped global corporations to create seemingly insatiable demand for bottled water in parts of the world. But bottled water is only part of a much bigger picture of social injustice between those individuals who 'have' and who 'have not'.

Most likely, there are suitable answers to many of the world's problems but while solutions are contingent on business success that is measured in financial terms we are unlikely to find answers which will give everyone access to a drink of water and a plate of food.

So water is no different to the commercialisation of many other commodities. It's just that in the UK, many of us are prepared to buy into bottled water brands to satisfy our daily needs rather than drinking from the tap, without much consideration of the sacrifices and wider impact of this act of consumption. The Foods That Make Billions gets into many of these issues and raises questions for us all to think about.

Dr Fiona Ellis-Chadwick is a senior lecturer in retail management at The Open University and an academic consultant on The Foods That Make Billions.

The Foods That Make Billions is on BBC Two at 9pm on Tuesday, 23 November.

For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

Comments made by writers on the TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

So, hello blog readers. Does that make you blogees? I like that, I'm going with that whether it's a word or not. The peeps at the BBC website thought you might want to know what goes in the making of a sitcom, so here goes it - an insight in to how my year pans out when making Miranda.

The writing is a long and arduous process and the least favourite part of it for me. It's not something I leap out of bed in the morning for. It requires patience (which I lack), discipline (which I lack), nerves of steel (which I lack), unending energy (which I lack) and hard core tea drinking and biscuit eating (this is where I excel).

The first couple of months I spend storylining. I present my ideas to my storyliners who help with the bones of the stories. We discuss them and get the episodes in to some kind of logical structure.

This is the hardest part. Often a sitcom storyline is like a very complicated jigsaw and we will be surrounded by large A3 pieces of paper with various jottings. And I get a little anxious and stressed thinking it will never come together.

When the storylines eventually work themselves out I go away and write them in to a script. It can take me as little as five days to write a first draft.

But then it will take a further three to four weeks to really hone that draft, making sense of the story, cutting it down to the essential bones (I always over write massively on my first drafts) and of course making it as funny as possible.

The key, and hardest part with writing a studio audience sitcom, is having as many laugh out loud jokes and funny moments on the page as possible. Which is why I also have a gag writer to help me punch up the scripts and suggest specific jokes that I might be struggling with.

I think ideally one needs about eight months to write six episodes of a sitcom. Two months to pace about for ideas and then structuring the storylines and then a month on each episode to really hone it.

You don't always get the luxury of that amount of time, and it is of course quicker if you write with others, but writing solo it needs that long.

Once the scripts are handed in, the fun starts - pre-production. Suddenly you find yourself having meetings with costume designers about characters you have written, or the props department about how exactly you saw that 'grapefruit you wanted to have befriended'.

"Well obviously two eyes, a mouth, a comb-over and bowtie drawn on to it."

Bizarre conversations.

It's always a thrill to see your silly imaginings really happening and other people (in my case, a truly fantastic team) help bring what you wrote to life.

Then it's the first read through. Absolutely terrifying! We will have cast the show and everyone will be reading it for the first time in front of all the producers and heads of every department.

All I want to know is 'do people find it funny, will they laugh?' It's daunting reading the first few lines and I need a pathetic amount of reassurance that the scripts really are OK before I am convinced enough not to change my career path and go and set up a tea shop.

We do six days location filming - all the things we can't do on the main sets in front of an audience like parks, churches, streets, etc. And then we rehearse Wednesday to Saturday and do the show on a Sunday night in front of a live studio audience. Six episodes, six weeks.



I am very nervous all day on the Sunday and then when I hear that first laugh I start to relax and truly enjoy it - hearing your words get an immediate reaction from an audience is an amazing thing.

And then you just hope the 300 people in that room are right, it is funny, and the audience at home will like it. There is always something to worry about.

So from writing it until filming then editing it, the whole process is about 10 months. And then I tend to collapse in a heap and remain horizontal for as much as I can of the remaining two months of the year.

It is a dream come true having my own comedy show on the BBC, but, by golly, it is hard work and lots of pressure. Here's hoping it's worth it and you enjoy the second series. (No pressure on you!)

Bye blogees. Thanks for reading.

Miranda

Miranda Hart is the writer, creator and star of Miranda.

Miranda is on BBC Two and BBC HD at 8.30pm on Mondays, finishing on Monday, 20 December.

Miranda will be introducing each episode of the sitcom on the BBC Comedy blog.

Comments made by writers on the TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Well where do you begin to tell a story like this? It's been the most amazing summer of my life travelling back in time for Turn Back Time - The High Street.

First the Victorian era. We had an absolute shock when we first walked into Shepton Mallet market square. I felt really proud to see our name up above the shop which we would be running for the next six weeks.

Going into the shop for the first time really was like walking back in time. All those history stories and lessons you had at school about the good old days, well this was it! There were sacks of goodies like loose biscuits, sugar cones, flour, lentils and so much more.

That's when the service era began. Customers were seated and their every need was taken care of. The era was one of opulence and saw the arrival of packaged foods.

Customers could take away their goods with much more ease or have them delivered.



We had cigarettes that were said to help with winter coughs and asthma and be especially suitable for women and children - amazing claim eh?!

In episode two, we had the bombshell of all the lads of eligible age being called up to go to war. I thought I was too old but I'm afraid it was not to be.

Whereas men of the time would have been conscripted, I left the shop to reflect on World War 1 with the other men in the programme. That left the girls to finally come out of the back room and see the real world.

At first my wife Debbie was really happy at the fact, because she had been stuck out the back since 1870 and it was now 1916! She aged well, don't you think?

But then it dawned on her that she was on her own, just like all those real girls were back in the Great War. Her happiness soon turned to one of 'Oh my golly, what am I going to do without the boys?'

Then the 1930s, the era of... well, I can only say sugar. Sweets everywhere, almost the entire shop was transformed again into a kiddy's (and Gregg Wallace's) dream come true.

Shelf after shelf of sherbet, toffee, sugared mice, midget gems and loads more.

One thing did surprise me though. The five-a-day slogan we hear so much about nowadays was actually around in the 1930s.

The shop shelves were pretty bare and it stayed that way for most of the era, with the exception of our little surprise. You'll have to watch to find out what I got up to!

I was 'sent to war' again - this time we had a day at Bovington Tank Museum to see a little of what those lads actually had to go through.

Very scary. I'd probably have run away if it was for real. Our tanks were just not up to the quality of the German ones. It took 10 of ours to destroy one of theirs.

That aside, we rode in a Sherman tank and it was a great day (although the marching we had to do beforehand was not quite as much fun).

We spent two nights away from the girls but our hosts were under strict orders to make sure we only had the same rations everyone else had.

I lost weight during that era. Even when we arrived at the accommodation for the final night, all we got was soup and sandwiches - and all we'd eaten that day was an egg and bacon roll.

But on a serious note, I take my hat off to all those brave and courageous people during the war. I am glad we didn't have to do it for six years. Five days was bad enough.

At the end we had a VE day party and all the people of Shepton Mallet cooked up a wonderful array of goodies for us all to eat. A fabulous end to a very hard era.



The Swinging Sixties was when the shop started to resemble a modern day supermarket.

Self service counters, tills with conveyer belts and still retaining an element of personal service for those who weren't quite sure about picking things off the shelves for themselves.

It was a bit saddening as I could see it wouldn't be long before we became a fully fledged supermarket.

I always bang on about the fact that they have destroyed the high street as we used to know it. Now all we have is big out of town car parks with huge great shops attached to them. They're always going to be around but it's so important that the high street can exist along side them.

Debbie had to be the perfect housewife and have my slippers ready every night when I returned home from work, cook a lovely meal and make sure that all was well with me.

I must admit it was nice while it lasted!

She also had to prepare a dinner party for all the other traders. Well, I've never seen such horrible recipes. Tomato mousse made out of tinned condensed soup, orange and tomato salad with mint leaves and watercress... the list of atrocities just went on and on.

By the 1970s, all my fears had come true. We had turned into a supermarket. Just plain old boring food on shelves, no more service, no more interaction with customers, just take the money and send them on their way.

Anyway that's enough moaning. Let's look at the more fun things that happened.

My son Harry and I had to dress up as chickens to sell off our stock during the power cuts of the 1970s. That was a laugh - as was the intercom system in the shop. And punk rockers coming in and nicking stuff from the shelves and defacing the goods with anti-establishment slogans.

The grand opening of the record store with a surprise band was really great fun. You'll have to watch to see who it was but what I will say is - save all your kisses for me guys.

I hope you like my little stories - all the best for now.

Karl Sergison is the grocer in Turn Back Time - The High Street.

Karl's daughter Saffron spoke to BBC Slink about her experience on the programme.

You can also read another post on the BBC TV blog by Tom St John Gray, producer of Turn Back Time.

Turn Back Time - The High Street is on Tuesdays at 9pm on BBC One and BBC One HD.

For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are the writers' own views and not necessarily those of the BBC.

The Indian Doctor is about Prem Sharma, and his wife, Kamini, who arrive in Britain in the summer of 1963. Rather than the bright lights of London, they are posted to a small Welsh mining village, taking over from the previous doctor there, who has unexpectedly passed away.

There, they encounter the curious villagers and the local English colliery manager, Richard Sharpe. He is most worried about a missing diary, belonging to the previous doctor, that may have incriminating evidence against him, linking the awful conditions in his mine and unusually high rates of lung disease.

I first got involved after the producers Deep Sehgal and Tom Ware approached me about 18 months ago. I thought too that it would make a really watchable drama.

I was particularly drawn to the 1960s and that, historically, many doctors from the Commonwealth were invited to Britain to support the relatively new NHS.

Of greater irony was that it was Enoch Powell who was seen to be doing the inviting.

Many members of my family arrived here at that time, so I recalled their stories and plundered their memories to get an idea of the kind of attitudes they faced but more importantly, what their emotional responses were.

I also spoke with a retired Indian doctor who did arrive in the 1960s and practised in a Welsh village (where he still lives), which was invaluable.

The biggest problem, he told me, was understanding the accent (ironically!) and the colloquialisms the locals used. Most Indians had learned very traditional English and had only heard the Queen's English at that.

Though the story does involve race, I don't think it's about racism. It's more about curiosity and preconceptions.

I experienced a degree of racism, particularly when I was at school in west London but I got it from both sides - the Asians and the white kids. There was a lot of racial tension at the time.

Racism, though born mainly out of ignorance, is just another form of bullying. So anyone who's been victimised or intimidated for something that they have no control over, should be able to relate to that.

The difference in our Welsh village is that it is small enough for people to get to know the Indian doctor and so even if people do have ignorant notions about him, the opportunity to dispel them is that much quicker.

The predominantly Welsh cast and crew seemed to have worked with each other many times before, especially on Welsh language dramas, so were very familiar with each other.

They were incredibly welcoming and warm towards me which made going into work every day a total pleasure. The crew were amongst the finest I've ever worked with.

I became aware of a collective approach to problem solving that doesn't happen very often in filming. Usually, different departments have to solve their own problems but here everyone pitched in.

I'd worked with Ayesha Dharker (Kamini) in a couple of movies and a mini-series and Mark Williams (Richard Sharpe) too. In fact all three of us were in Anita And Me.

Ayesha is one of the most instinctive and subtle actresses I've ever worked with so I always feel I have to raise my game with her. Mark is a man who can just about play anything. Supremely gifted, razor wit and annoyingly intelligent.

Off set, he's incredibly funny but also interested in everything. Having been involved with Harry Potter for the last 10 years, he's as comfortable conversing with kids as he is with grown ups. I think I fall somewhere between the two.

When you're filming, the script is a fairly organic thing (challenging to the writer!).

There are things that you discover aren't clear or don't work only when you get to the location or the set. Bill Armstrong had delivered a great script with lots of interconnected stories, the overwhelming majority of which is what we filmed.

The most important thing is for the actors to own the dialogue so minor tweaks were made with the blessings of the directors (Tim Whitby, Deep Sehgal), sometimes on the day. This is normal though.

There were so many highlights - it was probably the best telly experience I've had in the last five years. I tried to learn two Welsh words a day. Everyone from the make up department to sound and cameras pitched in with suggestions - that was fun.

No lowlights I can think of at all, but the 'oddlight' was driving to Cardiff from London and having to pay the toll when you cross the Severn Bridge. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was entering a giant theme park called Wales.

Daytime drama has always had an odd association to it. I suppose people immediately think of an Australian soap and assume that this can be the only tone.

However, recent compact dramas with strong writing and experienced actors, directors and writers such as Missing and Land Girls do suggest that the production values are much higher than merely a soap, which in itself suggests a production line approach to drama.

The main challenge for a daytime drama (apart from having to do everything on a miniscule budget compared to primetime dramas) is having to take into account the range of viewers that may be sitting in front of the box at that time of the day.

I record a lot of programmes, or watch them on iPlayer, so when they're on means a lot less to me than it used to. We would have, no doubt, approached some of the subject areas differently if the show was going out at 9pm, but I hope with the same charm and attention to detail.

I'm really proud to have been involved in such a collaborative, fun effort. All the credit goes to the people behind the cameras. Even the catering was great.

It was probably the most ego-free environment that I've worked in for ages, so perhaps proud is the wrong word. Privileged would be better.



Sanjeev Bhaskar plays Dr Prem Sharma in The Indian Doctor.

The Indian Doctor begins on Monday, 15 November at 2.15pm on BBC One and BBC One HD.

Further broadcasts are listed on the upcoming episodes page.

The Indian Doctor will return for a second series. You can read more about this announcement from Liam Keelan, controller of BBC daytime on the BBC TV blog.

The Indian Doctor is one of two programmes on BBC One to mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Swinging Sixties. Rewind The Sixties, presented by Lulu at 9.15am each weekday morning looks at the huge social change, creative innovation and historic importance that made the decade what it was.

Comments made by writers on the TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Garrow's Law is a show that I love and am very proud of. I've loved dramatising the trials to make history come alive and reading and using the trial transcripts, the words of defendants and prosecutors and judges and barristers, to hear that world as it was described by those who were there, experiencing it in that very moment.

However, turning the trials into drama wasn't simply a matter of going to the Old Bailey online archive and writing it up. In a compelling court case you need reversals and revelations, last minute interventions and the suspense of the judgement.

So, in other words, despite the historical resources at my fingertips I've had to make a lot of stuff up.

I knew nothing about Garrow until I started investigating him for the drama but then again, as I've discovered, neither did most of the legal profession.

Without William Garrow there would be no such thing as a courtroom drama. He made a drama out of the trial out of necessity really - those accused defendants in criminal trials had very few rights and their barrister could not get them a fair trial.

Garrow realised that if the law wouldn't allow him to defend his clients properly he'd use the only weapon available to him - by attacking and undermining those who prosecuted them.

His adversarial approach changed the criminal trial forever. He invented cross-examination as an art form and a way of exposing the corrupt motives of prosecutors, reward driven as so many were.

It's a difficult balancing act with Garrow's Law. We want to be historically accurate but dramatically compelling at the same time. The cases we dramatise all come from real events, real trials but we have necessarily used dramatic licence, using Garrow as a lightning rod through which to illuminate such cases.

For instance, in the first episode of series two, I have dramatised the case of the Zong - 133 slaves thrown overboard a ship. Those responsible for such a massacre were not prosecuted for murder but instead investigated for insurance fraud.

Not only was this a telling reflection on the status of black slaves (slaves were goods) but putting Garrow in the thick of it enables me to present such a grotesque and shameful history to viewers who might shy away from the same subject if it were a documentary.

I always wanted Garrow's Law to be a show that educated and entertained, using Garrow as someone whose work at the Old Bailey could tell us something new or too easily forgotten about our past and the rights he fought to gain.

However, he can't just be a proselytising reformer - we also have to invest in him as a vulnerable, fallible human being. We have to marry a narrative of the past with a dramatic narrative of the person and the personal.

This inevitably takes us away from a literal rendering of historical facts to an imaginative but truthful account seen through Garrow's experience. As we all know anyway, history is about interpretation.

My favourite moment in Garrow's Law is probably in the second episode of series one when Garrow suddenly turns to a less than honest witness and says, "Blast your eyes, you damned bitch!"

The courtroom is aghast at his sudden abuse of a woman until in the next breath he explains he is merely recounting an insult she's supposed to have suffered from the defendant. I love it when Garrow is playful, mischievous and deadly in court all at once.



Tony Marchant is the writer who created Garrow's Law.

Garrow's Law starts on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday, 14 Novemeber.

For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

Comments made by writers on the TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

If you count yourself a fan of Strictly Come Dancing, then have a look at the Strictly blog today.

Flavia Cacace is performing a specially choreographed Argentine Tango Unleashed - and the BBC experimented by filming it in 3D.

Flavia's dance was made into a trailer, which will be showing on 3D cinema screens and 3D TV screens around the UK for two weeks from today.

It's in support of Children in Need, which is on BBC One on Friday, 19 November.

It won't look like 3D on the web (as you need special 3D glasses to view it!) but if you fancy going behind the scenes to see how it was made, watch the short film on the Strictly blog.

Fiona Wickham is editor of the BBC TV blog

Our Edwardian Farm year is over! We have packed up the cottage, sent the animals off to their new homes and said a reluctant goodbye to all the many local people who so generously helped us.

But although it's over for the farming team and the crew - you can join us at the very beginning when the new series airs tonight on BBC Two.

It has been such a full year, hardly time to breathe let alone think. Alex Langlands, Peter Ginn and I are now quite a long standing team. Having lived through a 1620s year for Tales Of The Green Valley and then an 1880s year for Victorian Farm together we know each other well and have all ended up with our own interests and responsibilities.

This year we moved the filming to Devon, at Morwellham Quay, and while the action is based primarily on the farm, the new location allowed us to explore other aspects of the working countryside, including rivers, coasts and mining.

Peter's soft spot this year was for his fish. When it was suggested that we should have a go at hatching and raising trout for the sport fishing trade, Alex and I were rather sceptical, but Peter got stuck in immediately.

The odd contraption in the woods was regularly fiddled with and lovingly supplied with fresh juicy maggots throughout the summer. I don't know who was most surprised at its success, Peter or us.

Alex arrived for the year with his own cockerel - Sunny - under one arm, determined to make a go of poultry farming. My, was that cockerel pampered.

Ooh the food of this region has been a joy - scrummy and interesting. I also got a bike - wheeeeeee!!! The freedom, the speed, you have no idea of the sense of liberation.

Around the farm Peter supplied the most astonishing amount of muscle. Think you need a machine to do that job? Ha! Call Peter! It is not possible to overstate just how physical Edwardian country life was.

We have certainly all worked our socks off, farming, mining, scrubbing, fishing, a thousand and one jobs. Definitely worth it though, we have had a great year, so interesting, loads of fun and wonderful, wonderful people.

Ruth Goodman is a participant in Edwardian Farm.

Edwardian Farm is on BBC Two at 8pm on Wednesday, 10 November.

For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

Jimmy's Food Factory opened for business on BBC Onelast week, and I wonder if you found it hard to believe some of the surprising things I discovered about the food in our shopping trolleys.

Whether you love or loathe the supermarkets they feed the nation. There's a tremendous amount of science that goes into stuff on the supermarket shelves. It's science you wouldn't know anything about just by looking around the aisles.

To understand and unpick all this science, I tried to make the foods myself. I had tonnes of fun doing that during the series.

I loved this bit of kit - the spud cannon had to be my favourite gizmo of the whole series. I used it to slice up potatoes into oven chips. Watch the clip below to see just how well, and fast, it manages to make a spud into a chip - it's the most fun you can have with potatoes.

That experiment is fun but it's also based on what they really do in the chip factories - except they propel their potatoes using high pressure water jets through a lattice of super-sharp blades.

To be honest I wasn't sure it would work. I couldn't imagine that my spud gun would have enough power to force a potato through a slicer and turn it into chips.

But as soon as I fired it for the first time I knew I was onto a winner. I hadn't realised quite how powerful it would be. It had a real kickback and the potato shot out so fast it blasted a hole in the side of the wooden barn wall.

Another favourite of mine was my pedal-powered peanut shelling bike that I used to make peanut butter. Although it looks crazy, it's based on a bit of a real life kit.

In the developing world they use a version of it to shell up to 50 kilos of nuts an hour. It's changed people's lives. Often it's a hand operated machine but using pedal power is much easier.

Everything I do in the barn is based on what the factories do, and finding out their secrets but, as you'll have seen, things are a little bit more cobbled together.

Another great design was my squirty cream canister. I used a fire extinguisher for my cream can. It looked the right shape and could withstand loads of pressure - perfect. And it was almost too good.

We don't do any rehearsals with the machines on Food Factory, so we never quite know what's going to happen, and that was exactly the case with squirty cream.

I'd got so much gas into the fire extinguisher that when I pulled the trigger it exploded all over the place and I completely covered the film crew in squirty cream.

Being the pros they are, the camera crew just kept filming even though they were getting covered from top to toe in cream. I thought it was hilarious - I'm not so sure what they thought.

The other great thing about making Food Factory is getting inside the real food factories. It's unbelievable seeing the things we take for granted being made on such a massive scale - and seeing the tricks of the trade for myself.

Factories aren't just about machines, they're also about the people, and I love meeting people with such expertise and passion for their work.

In particular, I really liked going to the tea factory. I love drinking tea (think 15 cups a day is excessive? For me it's normal) and my grandad used to be a tea taster.

It's the tea taster's job to make sure every brew you make tastes the same - that's because your cuppa is made out of loads of different tea leaves.

The way the leaves taste keeps changing depending on where they're grown, the weather, and the soil. The tea taster has to make sure he blends together all those different leaves to get the same taste every time.

What really amazed me was that, even with all the technology we have nowadays, it was all down to one human being and his taste buds to work out what we like in our tea. Amazing.

But I guess the highlight of Food Factory has to making my own Jimmy Mart products that actually work.

The thing is, until I taste them I don't really know what they'll be like, as looks can be deceptive. And because my equipment is so rough and ready it can be difficult to refine the taste. So things can end up being either totally overwhelming, or a bit 'so what'?

You might think that sometimes it looks like I don't really want to taste my products - and sometimes you'd be right. All the cameras are up and ready to film the taste test and I'm thinking, 'I don't think I want to eat this after the things I've done to it.'

One of the worst ones this series was chicken Kiev (because I'd pulverised chicken carcasses on a car tyre). It was pretty awful - all the garlicky bit had totally dried out leaving me with a dry chewy wodge.

Chewing gum was a bit dodgy too (the weirdest set of ingredients you can imagine - completely unfood-like). But do you know what? Although I might have lost a filling or two chewing on my gum, it did work - it tasted like chewing gum.

And what made it even better was that the chewing gum experts told us we'd never manage to make it - but we did.



Jimmy Doherty is the presenter of Jimmy's Food Factory.

Jimmy's Food Factory is on BBC One and BBC One HD on Wednesdays at 8pm.

For further programme times please visit the upcoming episodes page.

When the idea of living the Good Life was mooted it felt like a no-brainer.

Spend the summer in dungarees, mooching round the garden, tending brassicas with one hand and a pair of goats with the other? Sounded like paradise, if paradise was a manure-smelling, weed-infested back garden in Metroland.

We wanted to experience the highs and lows of setting up your own smallholding, whilst capturing a flavour of the well-loved sitcom. I like to think we did Tom and Barbara proud, although the evidence is to the contrary - and despite my best efforts at 'doing a Kendal', it's unlikely my ageing tush will trouble the judges of Rear Of The Year in the same way Felicity's did back in 1981.

There were hard times. There were lessons learnt. It may well be fun to make your own wine, but by god it's the very opposite of fun to drink it. Pigs are great to play with, right up until the point until they hit sexual maturity.

From that moment on they see you less as their owner and more of a potential partner. Let me tell you, the very definition of fear is the sight of a 10-ton Gloucestershire Old Spot giving you the glad eye.

The four chickens kept us on our toes: Kerry (Katona), Katie (Price), Coleen (Nolan) remained in rude heath, but poor Theresa (May) - named because of her tendency to move way over to the right - went down with a terrible dose of anal mites. I was forced to hold her upside down and empty the best part of kilo of chemical dust up her backside. That certainly ruffled her feathers the wrong way.

Giles' learning curve wasn't so much a curve as a resolutely straight line. He came into the project scared of animals and he left scared of animals. On the plus side, we can now make a sort of artisanal, goaty ricotta through a sock - which I thoroughly recommend should you find yourself at home, bored, with a pet Capra Hircus and some spare winter hosiery.

I take from the show very happy memories of long sunlit evenings spent tending the vegetable patch and putting sun-block on the pigs' nostrils and ear-tips; of watching Mary Berry create the perfect Christmas feast and Peter Purves failing to make an advent crown. I hope you'll agree - that's a pretty Good Life.

Sue Perkins stars in Giles And Sue Live The Good Life.

Giles And Sue Live The Good Life starts on BBC Two on Monday, 8 November at 9pm.

For further broadcasts, please see the upcoming episodes page.

I can't remember exactly where I was when I had the idea for Letting Go (episode five of Moving On). I think, like lots of stories, I'd been carrying it around for a while. It was partly influenced by a group of people that I'd been working with.

As a writer I do work with different community groups. I've worked in prisons, with vulnerable young adults and with terminally ill people. For the last three years I've been working with drug and alcohol users who are in active addiction.

To begin with I had quite fixed stereotypical ideas about addicts and addiction and how it affects their lives and families. But the more I got to know them, the more I found that there was no such thing as a typical addict. Yes, some of my writing group are ex-offenders or street homeless, but others are ex-dentists, ex-engineers, social workers and teachers, some are still in employment.

Although I wanted to write an addiction story, I didn't want to write a drug story. Then I talked to a mother whose daughter is now at university but sadly after two breakdowns the mother herself is emotionally broken and will never return to work.

I talked to other mothers, spouses and fathers who had done everything to try to help the addict in their family and when they couldn't they themselves became ill.

These people are the focus of my story. I made Lee a heroin addict but he could easily have been a drinker or a gambler. This isn't his story, it's Kirsty's. The story about a woman who became addicted to fixing another adult. I wanted to reach out to anyone in the same situation, to show them that like her they can get off that chaos train.

Moving On is a collection of contemporary dramas which show a defining moment from where the characters move on in life. In my story Kirsty is forced to accept that she has become obsessed with someone else's life and isn't living her own.

Jimmy McGovern came up with the series idea and he had a very clear vision about the type of stories he wanted. Jimmy wanted contemporary social issues about real people. Then, as writers, we were asked to go and think about stories that we were passionate to write.

I submitted my idea and thankfully it was chosen for the second series. This was the third time that I'd worked with Jimmy and it's always a pleasure. He never tells you what to write or how to write it. What he does is ask all the right questions such as why is this character doing this? Why is this scene set here?

That's brilliant for a writer, it's exactly what we need. It makes you continually question whether you've got it right. In the past I've had script consultants who just want to rewrite your script their way so the end result is something that isn't very satisfying.

With this script I definitely felt it was mine, Jimmy worked with me, helping me to write the best script that I could.

Jimmy's also fab on the details, plot points, things like punctuation, which is great for me as I went to a trendy 1970s comprehensive that didn't teach grammar or spelling. Sadly my own education was quite poor.

Moving On did have a family feel, all 10 writers were invited to all the read-throughs. Which meant that we all got to support each other and hear every script and drink the odd glass of wine or two.

I've been asked a few times recently, why as a full-time writer, do I want to work with people in addiction - because it can be difficult. There are two reasons. The first being that my writing groups are people first and addicts second. And just like any other writing group there are people who are intelligent and sensitive and produce some outstanding writing.

Secondly I do passionately believe that people who work in the arts, whether it be painting, writing, music or dance, should try to reach out to as many people as possible. I have no big aspirations to be remembered as a fantastic writer but if I died tomorrow I'd like to think that I did at least try, through my art, to make people's lives better.

I have two favourite lines in the script. The first is when Lee is talking about heroin and his journey from loving it to hating it he says, "In my worst nightmares I watch it eat me."

It seems to me that drug addiction is like a slow death, like being eaten alive.

The other line is when Kirsty asks the dentist, "What sort of person judges people by their teeth?"

It sums up how we all judge each other all the time, fat or thin, old or young, affluent or not. We don't take the time to look at what's on the inside and I'm as guilty of that as anyone.



Karen Brown is the writer of Letting Go, episode five of Moving On - a 10-part drama written by a combination of new and established writers exploring contemporary social issues.

The series began on Monday, 1 November at 2.15pm on BBC One and BBC One HD.

Karen's episode, Letting Go, is on Friday, 5 November at 2.15pm on BBC One and BBC One HD.

For further broadcasts, please see the upcoming episodes page.

The BBC One HD channel launches with the One Show at 7pm tonight and in a specially made short video, Danielle Nagler, the head of BBC HD gets access to the BBC One control room, from where the channels are broadcast.

It's the most reactive playout room in the world - when a news story breaks, a football match overruns or an election is called, the staff have to move extremely fast.

You can have a peep at the continuity announcer - whose voice you'll totally recognise as the 'voice of BBC One' but whose face you've probably never seen - rehearsing the junctions.

Watch the video on the HD website. There's also a good FAQs page for all things BBC One HD.

Also on the About The BBC blog, Joe Godwin, the director of BBC Children's is talking about his 20 years in children's programmes - and the mission of his department today:

"Who would have thought that one of the most popular and talked about shows on any children's channel in 2010 is about history (Horrible Histories)? Who could have imagined that the most watched drama on any children's channel is based on British books about a young girl in the care system (Tracy Beaker Returns)? And who would guess that programmes about dealing with bereavement, bullying or protecting yourself online would be getting kids across the UK talking (Newsround specials)?"

Fiona Wickham is editor of the BBC TV blog.

I was approached to direct The First World War From Above earlier this year. Back then, my fantastic production team at the BBC had put together a dazzling array of stories and elements.

These included a piece of extraordinary archive footage, filmed from a camera strapped to a French airship in summer 1919, following the route of the Western Front and capturing the devastation in amazingly graphic detail. There was also the Imperial War Museum's collection of 150,000 First World War aerial photographs, a fascinating set of images giving a birds eye view of the battlefields.

Finally, we had a great selection of personal testimony: From Tommies in the trenches (and pilots up in the air) to the civilians who returned to their shattered towns and villages after the war.

The only challenge now was to turn it all into a film. How can you take such an iconic, enormous conflict such as the First World War and turn those four years of sacrifice into one hour of television?

When we met up with broadcaster and writer Fergal Keane, who was to present the film, we all agreed that, wherever possible, we had to try to reflect the lives and experiences of individuals - the soldiers, the pilots and the civilians who saw that corner of Western Europe utterly torn apart.

As we threw ourselves into the production, new and even more exciting stories started to emerge. Belgian archaeologist Birger Stichelbaut had been digging deep into the aerial images. He found that a photograph taken over Diksmuide in Belgium shows how some German soldiers unwittingly gave away their position to the British - by gardening.

Although the men's barracks were safely camouflaged under trees, the flowerbeds were clearly visible from above to British photographic experts. And once British commanders saw the flowerbeds, they soon directed their big guns onto the barracks.

We also learnt about the British tank stranded between enemy lines and 'rediscovered' it hidden inside an aerial photograph. Now historians have been able to map its precise location in the battlefields of Passchendaele.

We discovered that the huge networks of tunnels dug by both the British and Germans still lie underneath the villages along the Messines Ridge - and met a farmer's wife who fell into one of these tunnels just a few years ago.

And after some meticulous digging by our French researcher, Alice Doyard, we uncovered the incredible story of Jacques Trolley de Prévaux, the pilot who flew the airship above the Western Front and made the film in 1919.

I don't want to spoil the end of the film for anyone but Fergal finishes his journey through Belgium and France with a trip to Paris, where he meets Jacques' daughter - with some emotional and extraordinary results.

We're all very proud of the film. Do let us know what you think of it.

Mark Radice is the producer and director of The First World War From Above.

The First World War From Above first airs at 9pm on Sunday, 7 November on BBC One.