Archives for October 2011

The polar regions are truly other-worldly places - aside from their alien beauty, they are extreme and unforgiving, and some of the most challenging places on earth for a film crew to operate.

A female polar bear leads her two cubs across the sea ice.

If anyone ever asks what the key skill was for working on Frozen Planet, my answer is always the ability to work as a team.

Braving the elements, living on top of each other in out-of-the-way places, the most important skill is to be able to get on with those around you. Nobody can afford to be precious... or a princess.

Being a female director working in remote places can certainly pose challenges.

People often ask: what's it like not being able to shower for days, or what happens if you need to pee when you're out on the flat sea ice?

But really these are things you quickly get over (just ask the men to look the other way!).

The important thing is getting the shots you need, looking after the safety of your crew, and making sure everyone is happy.

I spent four years as part of the team for Frozen Planet, assistant-producing the episodes about people (The Last Frontier) and the environment (On Thin Ice), and for the bulk of the time, working as a field director on six of the seven episodes.

The role of an assistant producer is to take on specific sequences in the programme and look after the budget and logistics through to the edit.

In the BBC Natural History Unit, many producers are directors too which allows you to get out there and really take a hand in shaping the images as they are captured.

I did a total of 37 weeks directing in the field - two to six-week trips to the Arctic during the UK summer (it feels odd packing polar gear while the sun's shining and you're wearing flip-flops!), and then heading to the Antarctic Peninsula for 'summer' down there, in January and February.

A Frozen Planet camera operator dives under the ice to get the shot.

With a background in underwater filmmaking, many of the marine shoots came my way.

This meant getting to know large portions of the Arctic - home of bowhead whales, beluga, narwhal - and the many indigenous communities which were our access to the wildlife that lives there.

Some of the shoots involved diving under the sea ice - a chilly, and chilling, experience indeed when the water is almost -2C and you have little warmth above the ice ceiling to come back to.

In the Arctic, much of our accommodation was tent-based.

Camping under 24 hour daylight is hard to adjust to (I quickly found a sleep mask was an essential piece of polar equipment!) and there is always the risk of bears.

We were trained to use rifles and bear defences before going into the field - the reality of working in wild places where people are not in control.

But my favourite place, by far, was the Antarctic Peninsula. This is a place that is truly wild.

We worked from a yacht - the small but nimble Golden Fleece.

Waking up to extraordinary mountain ranges draped in ice, penguins and whales, icebergs and glaciers is like waking to a dream.

The air is different: cold and exquisitely clear, and there really is no other human for miles.

Here, one of the key characters we wanted to film were killer whales - the most awe-inspiring animals from the whole of Frozen Planet.

For the summer episode, our mission was to capture a hunt on camera, when pods working as teams chase down much larger whales such as minkes.

This meant staying just close enough to the pod to follow it, but not so close to spook them.

On Valentine's Day we found the perfect pod: 30 massive killer whales who were comfortable around us, and almost on cue, began to hunt.

Watching nature in the raw is not always easy, and as we followed the chase - for two and a half hours over 45 nautical miles of water - my emotions were mixed.

Yet the knowledge of seeing wild animal behaviour unfolding before your eyes snaps you back to reality - you are there to film and witness a moment that few humans would ordinarily get to see and you have to capture everything you can.

Seeing something so dramatic unfold, in a place that feels wild, remote, untouched, so far from civilisation, is a humbling experience.

It reminds you that we are just one species on this planet.

Every day, in remote corners of the globe, these animals live their lives - dramatic struggles for survival.

It's something I try and remember when I get home from the field, and wander the supermarket, pondering what to have for dinner.

Elizabeth White is one of the directors of Frozen Planet.

Frozen Planet starts on BBC One on Wednesday, 26 October at 9pm.

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

Despite our fascination with World War II it never fails to surprise me how many unusual, forgotten or relatively untold stories there still are.

An upcoming series of programmes on BBC Two takes a fascinating look at some of these lesser known tales, focusing on some of the ordinary heroes and debunking some of the myths that still surround famous events.

The series starts with one of the unsung heroes of Bletchley Park.

Although many people are familiar with the story of Alan Turing and Enigma, Codebreakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes reveals the unsung genius of mathematician Bill Tutte.

Restrictions imposed by the Official Secrets Act mean that experts are only starting to get to grips with how much his codebreaking efforts contributed to Britain's military success at the time, starting with his work cracking the Lorenz code, used by the Nazis and even more sophisticated than the Enigma code.

One of the things I find fascinating about this story is how much of his life Bill must have kept hidden.

Although he is now thought to have been one of the finest intellectual minds of his time, the secrecy of his position meant that he received very little public recognition for his efforts.

Following the war he worked as a university teacher in Waterloo, Canada (teaching the team that created the Blackberry encryption code) but it's almost certain that he continued to live a double life, using his unique number-crunching skills to benefit the British government.

It's an unusual story and one we're excited about.

Over the coming weeks there will be a series of Timewatch specials that look at similarly interesting stories.

In The Most Courageous Raid Of WWII (BBC Two at 9pm on Tuesday, 1 November) Lord Paddy Ashdown (an ex-SBS commando) talks about the 10 commandos who led one of the most daring raids of WWII.

The men canoed almost 70 miles behind enemy lines to blow up enemy ships but only two men survived; the others died of hypothermia or were executed by the Nazis.

Lord Ashdown was particularly keen not to just tell this story but to bring alive the extraordinary lengths that the men had to physically go to in order to achieve their goal.

Working with the Ministry of Defence Lord Ashdown takes part in a reconstruction of events, following the route the men would have taken and explaining the dangers they would have faced on the way.

It's a really moving film and hopefully one that honours all of the brave men that devised and carried out the raid.

Next we take an exclusive look at Operation Zigzag (in Double Agent: The Eddie Chapman Story on BBC Two at 9pm on Tuesday, 15 November), which is one of those 'you couldn't make it up' tales about double agent, self-made conman Eddie Chapman, aka Agent Zigzag.

He was a working class crook who - after a spell in prison having blown up bank safes in the UK - was recruited by the Nazis to put his skills to use destroying British assets.

On his first mission he became a double agent and spent years at the heart of the German military, passing information back to MI5, whilst also living as a German war hero.

Presented by Ben Macintyre (Operation Mincemeat), the programme uses previously classified MI5 files to tell the staggering story of how an average man became one of Britain's most valuable assets.

The final programme, Dam Busters: The Race To Smash The German Dams looks at the story of Dam Busters and tries to overturn some of the most common myths of what has become a legendary event.

All four programmes should give a unique glimpse into some of the lives of men in WWII.

Hope you enjoy them. Do let us know what you think.

Editor's note: The order in which these documentaries were broadcast changed after Martin wrote this post. For times and information for all four programmes, please see the Timewatch episode guide.

Martin Davidson is the commissioning editor for BBC History and Business.

You can listen to Ben Macintyre's story of Agent Zigzag narrated by Damian Lewis on Radio Four Extra - available until Friday, 4 November.

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

Hello. My name's Rufus Jones. I play Terry Jones in BBC Four's Holy Flying Circus.

I also play Terry Jones playing Michael Palin's wife, because it's that kind of show, and I'm that kind of guy.

My first memory of Monty Python? I think I was eight years old, my Dad had bought our first VHS player and he had decided to commemorate this with a night of Python.

Unfortunately, he rented The Meaning of Life.

I think he was expecting the silly whimsy of the Fish Slapping Dance - instead he sat there with a panicked grin while his eight-year-old son watched Graham Chapman being chased off a cliff by topless female rollerskaters in G strings.

I spent my early years thinking Monty Python was basically porn. Parrots, Piranha Brothers and Prophets came later.

The cast, left to right: Terry Gilliam (Phil Nichol), Graham Chapman (Tom Fisher), Michael Palin (Charles Edwards), John Cleese (Darren Boyd), Terry Jones (Rufus Jones), Eric Idle (Steve Punt)

Holy Flying Circus is hard to describe.

I think the phrase we've gone for is 'a re-imagining', which only really sounds right if you say it in a Californian accent.

The problem with most re-imaginings is that they frequently end up as de-imaginings, disappointing dilutions of the source material.

But I think Holy Flying Circus avoids this, and most of that is down to writer Tony Roche.

The script was really why we all signed up to do it. It had to be good.

If it wasn't, being asked to play some of the greatest comedians in history wouldn't be so much of a holy grail as a poisoned chalice.

But Tony had written something that was so funny you'd find yourself standing up and applauding as you read it alone in your bedroom.

As an actor, one constantly runs the risk of sounding like an enormous tool when saying things like that, but it really was completely exceptional.

Tony wasn't competing with Python or trying to ape their style - the laughs are more contemporary than Pythonesque.

There are some homages to famous Python sketches, but they're brief.

The script also tackles censorship and blasphemy with an intelligence that was quite thrilling to be a part of.

Steve Punt as Eric Idle is perfect casting in so many ways, not least because Brian was Monty Python's very own Mary Whitehouse Experience.

Basically, Holy Flying Circus is as slavishly faithful to the Python story as Life Of Brian was to 1st Century Galilee.

In other words, it's a mixture of outrageous liberties and surprising truths.

The cast don wigs and moustaches and get into character for Holy Flying Circus

The way TV works means that the first time the six of us were all together in wigs, costumes and in character, it was the first day of filming.

You hit the ground running, and as a result the first couple of days' shooting hummed with a certain low-level terror.

There'd be a lot of staring into space, trying to focus, with the occasional supportive comment like:

- Nice moustache.



- Cheers. (Pause.) Good grip on the pipe. Very, you know, 'Graham'.

- Thanks.

Mistakes would occur. I'd try and summon up Terry's voice and something unpardonably Pakistani would come out.

But then you relax, the impressions begin to run themselves and you concentrate on the script.

I don't often corpse, but there were occasions.

Jason Thorpe - who plays BBC exec Alan Dick and Tourette sufferer Desmond Lovely - is a mesmerically gormless young man.

And there was a take where Darren Boyd (John Cleese) unleashed without warning a fierce burst of Gumby that just floored the room.

All the Pythons in Holy Flying Circus are somewhat heightened.

In 1979, they'd just returned from the US when the Brian controversy began, so we gave Terry a look that was part Saturday Night Fever, part Welsh scrum half Gareth Edwards.

But half my time in Holy Flying Circus is spent playing Michael Palin's wife.

Looking over old Python, Terry had a lot of wonderful women in his back pocket, so to speak.

There were the Pepperpots and of course Brian's mum. But he also had a softer version - there's a Finishing Sentences sketch from Flying Circus series four that I took my cue from.

I suppose the challenge with Jones The Wife was to try and create something sweet, something truthful, then stick some fake boobs on it and see if the audience still bought it.

It's a bit of a high wire act.

Acting for days on end in women's clothing is strange - you forget you're wearing it and wonder why passers-by are pointing at you.

Only once did it become difficult: The day I had to wear high heels, and spent hours stumbling around like a transvestite baby giraffe.

Holy Flying Circus was a unique experience.

There was the job of not only playing legendary comedians, but the thrill of performing with a cast full of modern comic heroes - Stephen Fry, Mark Heap, Simon Greenall.

You'd look down the shooting schedule sometimes and it would read like a family tree of British comedy.

We all had a great time making it and hope you like it.

To be honest, I haven't even seen it yet. It may be balls.

In which case - and I think I've made this perfectly clear - the script was rubbish to begin with.

Rufus Jones plays Terry Jones in Holy Flying Circus.

Holy Flying Circus is on BBC Four and BBC HD on Wednesday, 19 October at 9pm.

Rufus will be voicing Nelson for the second series of Mongrels in November.

Find out more about the animation used in Holy Flying Circus on the BBC Comedy Blog.

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

Filming for Origins gave me the opportunity to do something I've never done before: to observe our closest cousins, chimpanzees, in the wild.

Earlier this year, on 5 March, I met up with a crew I knew very well - we'd filmed before on Incredible Human Journey - in Heathrow's Terminal Five.

We flew to Entebbe in Uganda, then drove some six hours to Kibale - the famous wild chimpanzee research station.

We arrived at the research station at dusk.

We were given a very serious health and safety induction which included: how to behave if a chimpanzee charged at you (stand up tall and wave your arms); how to behave if a forest elephant headed straight for you (stand aside); how to deal with army ants (don't stand on them).

The next day, we set off around 7am, walking into the forest, up a dirt track at first.

We were led by field guide Francis, who had worked at Kibale for 19 years.

On our team, assistant producer Mags Lightbody had been there in those early years, helping to habituate the chimpanzees to human presence.

Dr Alice Roberts holds a chimpanzee at the Uganda Wildlife Education Center. Strict rules in the National Parks mean that no one ever touches a wild chimpanzee in Kibale.

Five field assistants came with us to help carry all our gear into the forest. We turned off the track, down a steep and narrow path.

The forest was dense but the paths were well-used - by animals but also researchers.

Still, there was some pushing through undergrowth and our porters carried machetes to clear awkward or dangerous branches.

The forest was wet and getting steadily warmer as the sun climbed higher above us.

I was getting steadily warmer as well, as we trekked up and down through a series of thickly forested ridges and valleys.

At the bottom of the valleys, we would find ourselves splashing through small streams, or almost getting mired in boggy patches, which had been made even boggier by elephants, their massive, round footprints forming deep puddles.

Climbing a steep slope, Francis paused and whooped loudly, and I heard an answering whoop not too far away.

He was calling to the field assistants who were already out in the forest, with the chimpanzees.

We were very close, and in fact, when he pointed to the top of a tall fig tree just over the crest of the hill, I could see movement amongst the leaves.

Leaving the porters and the bulk of our gear behind, we carried on, as a smaller team, and came across the four field assistants and postgraduate students, all armed with notebooks.

Six or seven chimpanzees were high in the tree, eating a breakfast of figs.

They lay in the crooks of forked branches, reaching out to pick the fruit, and occasionally moving to a new branch, with a rustle and a small shower of falling leaves.

After about half an hour, they started to come down from the tree, and then they were off, knuckle-walking at a fast pace through the forest, and we followed them at a discrete distance.

They didn't stay move as a group. They came down out of the tree singly, although little ones stayed close to their mothers, jumping onto their backs for a lift once on the ground.

They kept in touch with each other with occasional grunts and pant-hoots as they dispersed in the forest, but they also seemed to know where they were headed.

Francis said the fig tree was a favorite place to start the day, but they'd stop off at other trees throughout the day.

They liked eating fruit in the morning, and ate leaves on the ground in the afternoon.

There were about 1800 chimpanzees in the whole forest; the group we were tracking comprised around 50 chimps, but this was also broken up into smaller groups of 15 to 20.

And all the time, groups would be splitting and fusing, with individuals moving between groups - chimpanzee society is very dynamic.

As the chimpanzees moved between trees, they were all around us in the forest, and would often pass by very close, sometimes a metre or two away - which was both terrifying and exciting.

Francis was very aware of where the chimpanzees were around us and would warn us - "There's someone over there," he would say.

The Kibale chimpanzees aren't hunted for bushmeat, and they're never fed by the researchers in the forest, so these chimpanzees viewed humans neither as a threat nor as a source of food.

Getting so close to the chimpanzees whilst they effectively ignored us was a huge privilege.

They were behaving naturally, just getting on with chimpanzee things, whilst we watched them.

Observing chimpanzees in this way is valuable and fascinating in its own right, but it also helps us understand ourselves.

We start to see where the real similarities and differences lie, we can identify the things about humans that are truly unique, when we compare ourselves with our ape cousins - with whom we have a common ancestor, going back some six to seven million years ago.

We had a good day's filming; cameraman Paul Jenkins was delighted that he'd been able to capture so much footage of the chimpanzees.

So, while it was still light, we started to head back to the research station.

We may only have been about a mile away from the compound, as the crow flies, but it took about an hour and a half to get in and out of the forest.

We were all happily tired at the end of the day, and settled down for a well-earned beer and a hot supper.

Going to bed early, I made sure that my mosquito net was safely tucked in under the mattress, and listened to the sounds of the forest again as I dropped off.

We'd be back in the forest again in the morning.

Dr Alice Roberts is the presenter of Origins Of Us.

Origins Of Us starts on BBC Two on Monday, 17 October at 9pm.

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

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

I guess there are two ways of approaching a TV production: knowing exactly what you want to say and finding the people who fit into the mould, or telling the story you discover as you go along.

There's always going to be a bit of an overlap, but in the case of Mixed Britannia on BBC Two I'd say it was definitely the latter.

George Alagiah with the families featured in the Mixed Britannia series

The brief from the commissioning editors was to produce a history of mixed race Britain.

It's one thing to research the facts and figures, the dates and so on - but it wasn't until we started filming that I realised we were telling the story of some extraordinary women.

Just imagine what guts it must have taken to defend and persevere with a relationship with a Chinese or Yemeni man as far back as the early 1900s.

These women were ostracised, accused of being prostitutes and publicly rebuked on the streets.

Women like Elizabeth Taylor from South Shields who married the Yemeni seaman, Mohammad Hassan, in the 1920s were heroines.

They were strong women - they had to be - who were adventurous and open-minded.

The one preconception I had about making this series was that I didn't want it to be a whinge-fest about race.

I didn't just want to do programmes about how tough it was to grow up mixed race.

We haven't ducked those issues - you only have to look at episodes two and three about the plight of the so-called "brown babies" after the Second World War, or the poignant and sometimes tragic lives of mixed race children in adoption.

But for me the primary question all three programmes had to answer was slightly different.

What does it say about all of us, the British, that we have ended up in this remarkable place where our mixed race population is growing faster than just about any other comparable country?

Britain was subject to the same pressures and prejudices as America or Germany (the influence of the eugenicists is an example) but we avoided the worst excesses of those countries.

I'm not naïve enough to believe this was the result of enlightened politics - there were plenty of bigots here - but I do think there was something unique in the British experience, the history of empire and trade, which meant we took a different approach.

Mixed Britannia is as much a history of Britain as it is a story about those brave people who dared to find fun, friendship, and love across a forbidden frontier.

George Alagiah is the presenter of Mixed Britannia.

Read George Alagiah's views on being mixed race in Britain on the BBC Magazine.

Mixed Britannia is a three-part series on BBC Two starting on Thursday, 6 October at 9pm as part of the Mixed Race Season.

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

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

A little over three years ago I set up a school to teach the rare art of natural navigation.

Since then I have run courses, indoors and out, teaching hundreds of people how to find their way using only the sun, stars, moon, plants, animals, weather and buildings.

When my book on the subject came out I was delighted to learn that there were tens of thousands of people interested in finding their way using nature.

The BBC got in touch and asked whether there might be a way to introduce millions more to this very unusual world.

The Natural Navigators, left to right: Stephen Mangan, Alison Steadman, Sue Perkins and Tristan Gooley

The plan was for me to teach Alison Steadman, Stephen Mangan and Sue Perkins the basics of natural navigation and then send them on three journeys together.

For each journey I would write a short guide, prompting them to look for certain clues along the way to the next place they would be visiting.

Setting up any natural navigation challenge is always a bit of a Goldilocks problem: the routes must not be too easy or too difficult.

For All Roads Lead Home we tried really hard to mix the right level of challenge with areas that would be fascinating for the participants, and therefore the viewers - and it meant that more than two-thirds of the routes we considered never made it to the filming days.

The producer, Zoe Timmers, and I travelled to the areas that had been chosen by the participants to prepare the routes.

I was focusing on the natural navigation clues and challenges, whilst Zoe was thinking logistics.

We met some truly extraordinary individuals, from a ranger in a peat bog to Wise Women in stone circles.

Sue, Stephen and Alison would travel to Cornwall first, then Ireland and finally Wales and Liverpool.

I knew that we would have to make the challenges get steadily harder from a gentle start, but nature does not always follow the same agenda.

In some places there were good clues everywhere when I wanted few, and in Ireland and Wales there were many misty moments when I found it very challenging myself and feared for the prospects of my students.

Stephen Mangan, Sue Perkins and Alison Steadman finding their way home

The first two days of filming were the training days. We met on day one at West Dean College, near Chichester.

I didn't think anyone else would feel this, but for me there was a real sense of a first day at a new school: it was a morning of meeting new people, trying to do what the headmaster (I mean director) Andrew told us to do, without looking a fool in front of everyone else.

I didn't learn until later that day that for Alison and Stephen, this was a new experience too.

Although they are of course hugely experienced in TV, they told me they had never done an unscripted outdoor series like this before.

Added to all this, nobody had ever tried to make a series about natural navigation before, let alone release three people into the wild during it.

The challenge of getting three people confident enough to navigate naturally on their own in two days is big enough, without any cameras - if something takes five minutes without cameras it has the potential to take an hour or more with them.

Added to this we had some bad luck with the weather.

Improvisation was called for, cardboard models of the moon were thrown to one side as they grew soggy in the rain, and I ended up using a piece of chalk to sketch the moon on a stone floor under the shelter of the porch of the college.

We had a lot of fun, largely due to the patience and good humour of all involved.

Andrew, Zoe, myself and all the crew did our best to adapt to the unknown, and Stephen, Sue and Alison did what they couldn't help: they made us laugh, a lot. (I learned that it's quite easy to tell when it's time for entertainers to take on another challenge: they start spontaneously breaking into song and dance.)

At the end of two very full days it was time for me to release my students to their own journeys.

I think we all worried: Would they find it impossible? Would they find it too easy?

Would they all have tantrums when stuck on Bodmin Moor for hours with no prospect of escape except the memory of me explaining something once a few weeks ago?

If the first training morning had felt like going to a new school, then the end of day two felt like dropping Alison, Stephen and Sue at the gates and waving goodbye.

No tears now, be brave. It had been an experience unlike anything I have ever done before.

Tristan Gooley is the natural navigation expert for All Roads Lead Home.

All Roads Lead Home starts on Wednesday 5th October at 8pm on BBC Two.

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

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