Sara Parker, daughter of original Radio Ballads producer Charles Parker, is an award-winning radio producer in her own right so it was natural for her to be involved in the making of the 2006 Ballads. Here she writes about the making of The Enemy That Lives Within.

My father always used to say that as an interviewer you should sit at a person's feet and listen. So I listened to his 1962 polio ballad The Body Blow before I set out to record my interviews for the HIV ballad, another condition which totally engulfs a human.

As the CD played, I was reminded of an early childhood memory of my father taking one of his interviewees on holiday with us to Wales. She was in a wheelchair and I remember the nightly struggle getting her up the B&B's steep, windy stairs to bed. I don't know how my father came to bring her on our family holiday but he was that kind of person. It's this kind of humanity I hope comes out in my interviews.

Due to the intensely personal nature of HIV/AIDS and the discrimination and prejudice that still surrounds the condition, I sought expert advice and willing talkers through the Body And Soul support charity in London. They introduced me to six extraordinary people who talked with calm frankness about exactly what living with HIV involves.

There is Maxwell - not his real name - whose school friends still don't know he's HIV positive. He copes by thinking of himself as having two identities, the Clark Kent of daily life and the 'Superman' who copes with the hidden disease.

Cecelia fled the Ugandan civil war with her small son only to find a different kind of enemy in this country. Thinking her husband killed in Uganda, she started a relationship with a man she met in Britain – only her second sexual partner – but contracted the virus from him. Perhaps one of the most moving interviews was with a mother whose son had been one of the first to die of the disease in Britain. She spoke about her son's descent into AIDS dementia shortly before he died. "The worst of it is, he's not who he was," she said. "He looks the same, he talks the same but he wanders off into a world where you cannot follow."

It is impossible to understand the desolation of such a world blighted by the HIV virus unless you have experienced it. I hope The Enemy that Lives Within gives some understanding through the voices of those who have been there - and come out the other side.