So you’re standing on The Strand with Ben Chaplin surrounded by gawping pedestrians and you’re running out of time. You need to shoot your scene quickly but precisely – you’ve got Ben for the next hour before he’s needed elsewhere – so you tell him exactly what you need, the camera goes up on sticks, the team lines up the shot and your first AD shouts “action”. Ben does the scene flawlessly – but a pedestrian walks into shot. You call “cut”. You need to go again.

This is the “second unit”, a splinter crew from the main production team, and over the course of several months you’ll be working with actors like Ben, Charlotte Riley and Paapa Essiedu on moments, images and scenes that fit into the tapestry of BBC One’s Press, a flagship production about the modern media written by the estimable Mike Bartlett. You’ll also be shadowing superstar director Tom Vaughan throughout the production as he effortlessly brings Mike’s words to life through a thousand decisions a day, executed quickly and confidently. The last time Mike and Tom worked together they made Doctor Foster, a TV phenomenon. The pressure, it’s fair to say, is pretty high.

The scene is shot, high fives all round. Ben smiles, tells you he likes your hat and heads back to the main unit. Later, you’ll find yourself in an industrial estate after dark, directing a fleet of articulated trucks emblazoned with the logo of “The Herald”, one of the show’s fictional newspapers, as they make their way into the night. It’s like a moment from a Michael Bay film – thundering vehicles barreling past camera – and you realise you need more light for your overhead shot, filmed from a nearby hill. The lighting team springs into gear, runs downhill to set up more lights. Your AD shouts into a radio, and the lorries creep forward. One of the lorries is too slow off the mark – the convoy doesn’t look slick enough – so you call cut. You need to go again.

Over months you work on many moments like these. Lowloaders and dollies, swinging to a fifty. While Tom works tirelessly on scenes with the cast, you find yourself on an airstrip in the middle of nowhere directing a stunt for a pivotal moment in episode one with a coordinator who staged the fight scenes in the Star Wars movies. The stunt isn’t looking quite right – the police car needs to go faster. “Let’s go again” you say, and you pinch yourself, because it isn’t every day you’re working with people who trained Darth Maul how to swing a lightsaber and telling them you need another take. But then you remember you’re here for a reason – in this era of peak TV, there aren’t enough directors with the experience required to look after shows of this budget and scale. And so Directors UK and Skillset have set up a competitive scheme to give up-and-coming directors the experience of “high end” shows to help push their careers forward. You applied, interviewed, made the cut. You need to get the moment right. And so you go again.

That’s one reason you’re here. But the real reason everyone’s shivering on a remote airstrip at 9pm – is the excellence of the material. Press is an exhilarating, insightful piece of writing – whip-smart characters arguing about the challenges of journalism in an era of fake news, and the pressure to do the right thing in a world which values clickbait over commentary and entertainment over nuance – and everybody involved, from fearless producer Paul Gilbert and tireless line producer Kirsten Eller, rockstar production designer Paul Cross and unflappable First AD Kristian Dench to the runners Alicia and Emily hushing quiet in the wings of 3 Mills Studios, is working their hardest to bring Mike Bartlett’s words to life with the diligence, focus and attention to detail that his script demands.

When Press airs on BBC One on Thursday 6 September at 9pm I hope people enjoy the show for the nuance of Ben Chaplin and Charlotte Riley’s excellent performances, the sparkle of Mike Bartlett’s writing and the verve of Tom Vaughan’s powerhouse directing. But I also hope they’ll sit through the credits at the end and read every name – it’s a roll call of excellence. So many talented people giving their utmost for six hours of evening entertainment.

As for me? Fingers crossed, I’ll be directing my own high end show soon. Cut. Print. Let’s go again.

Nimer Rashed is a Director

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RTS Channel Of The Year

• Read the full list of winners on the Royal Television Society website

Animals With Cameras is one of the most exciting projects I have worked on in over 20 years of making factual television because it is a genuine collaboration between film-makers and scientists.

For some time now there’s been a movement in the scientific community to use cameras to learn more about animals’ lives. The problem is that there are enormous technical challenges involved in building cameras which are small enough for an animal to wear comfortably, without affecting their behaviour, but which can also generate footage of a high enough quality to be useful. With hindsight, it was a no-brainer to bring the Natural History Unit’s accumulated 60 years of camera-innovation experience to bear on solving the scientists’ problems.

Animal welfare was our number one priority. Before even thinking about putting a camera on an animal we had to be certain that the camera wouldn’t inconvenience it or cause discomfort. Building the cameras involved a constant dialogue between us and the scientists. They would specify the size limits, the best way to attach the camera, the maximum length of time it could be deployed and the best way to get it back afterwards. The production team would then source the parts and work through a number of designs and prototypes until everyone was happy. Without the scientific experts’ sign-off on animal welfare there was no deployment.

There also had to be a clear potential scientific benefit to putting the camera on-board. We only got involved if the scientists felt that the footage would help them to better understand their animals’ lives and we were led throughout by the questions they wanted to answer. The reality is that it is very hard to observe animals everywhere they go. How do you follow meerkats through their labyrinth of burrows, a chimp into the treetops? Sometimes an on-board camera is the only way and the knowledge gleaned can be of great value in protecting the animal into the future. Understanding more about how and where penguins feed, for example, could help to shape decisions about fisheries policy.

Most of our camera systems were designed and built by Chris Watts, for whom camera innovation runs in the blood. Chris’ father, Jonathan, has been building bespoke specialist cameras for wildlife film crews since the Eighties.

The cameras really are marvels of miniaturisation. Most were built from scratch, with the components - batteries, lenses, circuit board etc - often plundered from other cameras. It’s only been in the last few years that technology has moved to the point where it’s possible to make cameras on this scale that can shoot in High Definition and have enough battery power to run for hours at a time.

We went to great lengths to ensure there was as little disruption to the animals as possible – shaving the penguin cameras down millimetre by millimetre to minimise drag for example, or cutting holes in the cheetah head harness to create a cooling flow of air between head and camera. Most of the cameras could be removed by the animal (though this did result in some being destroyed in spectacular fashion, most notably by Kimbang, our orphan chimp) and the maximum length of time they stayed on was a couple of days (most were just on for a few hours).

Picture quality was also crucial and we have the perfectionism of Chris and Marcus Shirley, our underwater camera designer, to thank for helping us achieve that. Marcus dived into the sea off Plymouth at night in mid-winter in order to test the light sensitivity of a range of different potential underwater cameras and spent months working with a Portuguese engineering company to perfect the innovative ‘Devil Ray Cam’ (a ground-breaking design which is towed along behind the animal). Chris spent long hours making sure his camera could see past a baboon’s chin and testing different ‘Guardian Dog Cams’ on his pet Labrador.

Perhaps my favourite example of perfectionism, however, came with the meerkat cameras. Not only did he manage to fit miniature infra-red LEDs on to the camera collars to help us to film in the pitch black of the tunnels (without disturbing the meerkats) but he also adjusted the LEDs so that the lights bounced off the walls, rather than pointing directly down the tunnel. This gave the lighting a much softer feel, resulting in much more attractive images, and also enabled the cameras to pick up much more of the detail of what was going on.

The revelatory footage we’ve shot has enabled us to tell some great new stories about animals’ lives and allowed us to see the world through their eyes in a way that’s not been possible before. As wildlife film-makers, however, there’s something even more satisfying about this series. We rely constantly on scientists to point us to exciting new animal behaviour so it’s great for us to be able to give something back and help the scientists in return.

Dan Rees is Series Producer, Animals with Cameras

Animals with Cameras continues on BBC One on Thursdays at 8pm, or catch up on iPlayer

“You come in to the field with a plan, but ultimately you do what nature tells you.”

Ted Giffords, Cameraman

“You come in to the field with a plan,” says cameraman Ted Giffords, “but ultimately you do what nature tells you.”

The plan, for a key sequence in the BBC’s forthcoming Blue Planet II, was to try and film an amazing new behaviour. It’s one of countless new behaviours that viewers will see on Blue Planet II, not least because, as series Executive Producer James Honeyborne says, the science has moved on.

“New discoveries have given us a completely fresh perspective on life beneath the waves. What you’ll see across the series are new stories featuring new species, new places, new behaviours, all filmed in new ways. Our USP is very much newness.”

This particular piece of newness consisted of a marine double act featuring both Killer whales and Humpback Whales. More than a decade ago Blue Planet, the BBC’s last landmark story of the seas, filmed Orca working Herring. ‘Working’ means corralling the fish, bamboozling them, wrangling them in to a tight ball like a border collie with a flock of sheep. Then the Orca stuns one or two with a flap of its tail and ends up with a meal floating deadweight in front of it.

What scientists have observed in recent years - is that Humpback Whales, all 30+ tonnes of them, have started to get in on the act. Humpback Whales are thought to react to the commotion of the Orcas corralling the Herring. Swooping in and opening up their vast mouths, the Humpbacks swim through the buffet that the Orcas have so generously laid on for them, and gobbling up dozens of fish in a single pass. It’s a smash and grab run of epic proportions.

The plan sounded simple: film this behaviour happening. But in order to locate the whales on the infinite fjords of northern Norway, the crew need to do what nature is telling them.

Nature’s message is relayed by seagulls. The footballer Eric Cantona was mocked when he talked about seagulls following trawlers in the hope of finding fish, but his rationale was sound. The seagulls do indeed follow the trawlers when there are Herring to be had, and it is herring that the Orca, and hence the Humpbacks, will follow.

Today is day 10 of a two week shoot, but it’s also the culmination of two years’ work. Producer Jonathan Smith has been following the herring, and thence the Orca and the Humpbacks, for two years for this sequence. He has done stints underwater, diving with a rebreather (to avoid bubbles on camera) in near freezing temperatures. He has tracked the Herring from out in the open Arctic in to the fjords, where for reasons we still don’t quite fathom they have moved just this last year. The whales have followed. They may not be here next year; they weren’t here when Blue Planet I was filmed. This is Smith’s last shoot. He has yet to see a Humpback pull off its heist.

We are so far north, inside the Arctic Circle, stationed on the remote island of Vengsoya, that the days are hopelessly short. It is deep in to November and every day the sun comes up 20 minutes later. Light is at a premium - it’s workable from about 11am today and it will expire at about 2.30pm. And so a converted fishing boat is readied before sunrise and we head out on to the fjords in the mizzle.

Natural history work takes you to remote places but it is rarely a solitary pursuit. As we run north towards the open ocean Smith is messaging a network of contacts - scientists from the Norwegian Orca Survey, fishermen, guides - all of whom are out on boats of their own already. Cameraman Ted Giffords has his own assistance, in the form of a 1,000 millimetres long lens on a giro-stabilised boom arm, handy for spotting gatherings of gulls at several kilometres. He’s glued to his screen, on look out. And Skipper Torre has an app, naturally, for monitoring marine traffic. It tells him where the boats are, what they are and if they’re fishing. Cantona Theory dictates that boats + seagulls = Herring, and Herring = Orcas. Humpbacks are the final variable in the calculus. You need all of the elements, plus the light and a dab of luck, to be in with a chance of a shot. So far they haven’t got any decent footage of the Humpback bursting through with its mouth open - the money shot - in ten days on the water.

Jonathan Smith promises an abundance of Orcas and so inevitably we start off finding none. There is a slight tension as phones are checked, charts scanned and far off, shadowy surface ripples turn out to be everything but whales. There’s not much time.

The sun, when it does rise, barely makes it above the horizon, a pink bedspread laid on the skyline. But as it does, at around 10.30am, a tip-off comes in, and Smith orders the boat to be turned around. We head to Kaldfjorden. It’s a 300 metre deep, 10 mile-long inlet that cuts south and then south-east between stark snow-topped peaks. We motor there to find trawlers and gulls at the far end and still we see… nothing. Smith remains positive - a requirement of the job, I suspect - “These seas contain the most amazing biomass of animals in the ocean,” he says. “Normally we’d have seen loads of Orcas by now.’”

You have to be prepared. Ted Giffords is in charge of the Cineflex camera that will get us the shot, if only the sea life would oblige. The Cineflex allows the boat to be bobbing all over the place while the shot remains still and composed. There are between five and ten Cineflexs of this type in the world - they’re hard to track down because they were originally designed for the American military and they can’t be moved from country to country without specific security clearance. This one has a 4K camera inside its sealed, counter-weighted housing and it can shoot in slow-motion; previous series like The Hunt couldn’t, and they weren’t filmed in such high definition. But higher definition requires more light. Giffords notices that his technical explanations are losing me:

“Basically it’s harder to do but the end result is better. People will notice a difference.”

You can’t not notice an Orca, especially in these flat, calm waters - their dorsal fins can be up to 6ft high on a male, and they travel in pods, usually five or more. Their stately silhouette is unique. Smith and his crew are seasoned spotters, and a tap on the shoulder alerts me to our first sighting, with one, two, then three spouts as the Orcas blow, several hundred metres away. We chug in their direction and on the way spot our other cast members - Humpback ‘blows’ are bushier and more spread out, I’m told. The sight of the Humpbacks’ magnificent tails rising, fluking and slipping away has me excited, but the crew are unmoved: they’re just ‘logging’ or relaxing, not feeding.

Suddenly there are Orca wherever you look down the Kaldfjorden, carving elongated Ms through the surface, while humpbacks rise and dive in tandem. With the sun now up and the mountains glistening it is an awesome spectacle – but it’s a distraction, and I fail to notice what’s happening on our other side, right up by the shore. It’s a group of Orcas, swimming back and forth in formation, so close to the water’s edge it’s as if they’re on watch. Smith is excited. “They’re definitely working fish. This could be about to kick off.”

And then it kicks off.

“Halve the distance between here and the shore,” Smith calls to skipper as he grabs his binoculars. “Pick them up at one o’clock so we can keep the view… Humpbacks at 10.’

It sounds like he’s expecting the animals to arrive on a pre-arranged schedule, until I realise that the hands of a clock are the shorthand amongst captain, producer and cameraman for target location.

The Orca swim away but there’s a shadow visible beneath the surface, heading directly towards where they were. Smith tells Giffords to bring the camera to three or four, Giffords thinks they need to be on the other side, but Smith tells him there’s no time, something is going to happen now, and right on cue small fish start leaping out of the water, churning it up like it’s coming to a fierce boil. The sound makes me spin round just in time to catch sight of 36 tonnes of Humpback whale arcing out and then back down through the surface. I cannot believe what I have just seen.

But the team know instantly that they have not seen enough: Smith and Giffords take a look at what they just filmed, and even though it’s all there in stunning close-up the humpback’s immense mouth only occupies the left of the picture.

“To get that magic it needs to be full frame,” says Smith.

The captain turns the boat around. They know by now that a hungry Humpback will take several passes at a hearty fish supper, and even better, the Orca are back, pushing the Herring even closer to the shore, driving the fish in to the shallows where they can’t escape. With a silvery slick of fish at the surface, the Humpback must surface too. We wait, but not for long. The Cineflex camera hangs over the edge of the boat, and again the whale’s shadow ghosts towards us. This time Giffords is ready and the spectacle is centre stage: as the whale surfaces the water becomes pockmarked and froths with fleeing fish. And then the whale breaks the surface, mouth gaping open, an epic parabola of baleen-plate teeth, humped back, small dorsal and disappearing fluke, before a colossal crash; the vast shadow recedes quietly in to the deep.

The crew holler and celebrate. “We have one!” says Ted Giffords as Smith congratulates his men. It is the first major behaviour shot they have got on this stint, the culmination of a new piece of scientific observation that it’s hard to credit as real until it’s been filmed and shown. And yet still the light remains the most precious commodity, and so minutes later we’re off again in search of another piece of ‘magic'. The ocean is boundless and there’s always more to see. The Blue Planet film crew just have to find it.

“It’s a cliché,” says Jonathan Smith, still with binoculars in hand, “but the only time you don’t get something is when you stop looking."

And that’s a theme that goes not only for this shoot but for the whole Blue Planet II series.

“We’ve completed 125 expeditions to 38 countries around the world, and our camera teams have worked in every continent and across every ocean,” says James Honeyborne, back in the UK. “One of the things that has really fascinated me during the making of this series is the extent to which we’re on the front line: we’re not just reporting these scientific stories, we’re actually help uncovering new scientific stories. So much so that at least 15 scientific papers are being written on behaviours we’ve filmed. That’s the levels of newness we’re at, that is the great opportunity of being in the sea, and that’s the great excitement for us.”

Blue Planet II starts Sunday 29 October at 8pm on BBC One. To find out more about the series read the full media pack or watch the prequel on iPlayer now.

Back in July 2013 BBC Studios’ Documentary Unit gained unprecedented access to The Metropolitan Police - Britain’s largest busiest police service. It was the first time they'd let the cameras in to make an observational documentary series. Now, in its second series the team take another look at the scale of different police units across London. Filmed over a year, the team go behind the scenes of police work, giving viewers an in-depth look at how the Met works.

The Met: Policing London follows officers of Britain’s biggest and busiest police service as they deal with life, death, crime and its victims, all across the capital. We wanted to make a second series, as there were many areas of The Met and London that we hadn’t seen in the first one. It had been a huge success for BBC One, both critically and as a ratings hit. Feedback from our audience showed that they felt they’d had an opportunity to see this massive and sometimes hard to penetrate organisation in a more human way.

Although we had done it once, it didn’t make it any easier to make a second series! We wanted to replicate the feeling of breadth and scale, capturing the enormity of what the police do every day across the city, but it was important to try and look at some different areas of policing and London. So access conversations had to start from scratch again so we could meet new officers and take our audience to other parts of London we hadn’t been in before.

We were very lucky to have an incredibly committed production team who worked for over a year and a half to make this series.

A big part of police work is responding to the thousands of 999 calls they receive a day. This time, we followed officers from Newham, Hackney and Westminster as they dealt with anything from multiple stabbings to an argument over a car parking space. Part of the challenge for the police and us, was never knowing what you were going to find, until you turned up at the scene of the call. Seeing officers dealing with people in a crisis or just trying to establish what was going on was always interesting and sometimes darkly funny.

One of the new units we worked with for this series was the Sexual Offences Unit, who deal with and serious sexual assault. It was important for us to include these crimes as they are incredibly serious and the victims have to live with the ordeal and humiliation for the rest of their lives. They’re also very difficult and sensitive crimes for the detectives to deal with and conviction rates are low.

We also looked at London’s busiest custody suite in Brixton. The team spent countless nightshifts in the unpredictable and at times, chaotic environment to capture the relationship between custody sergeants and their detainees.

On one hand, filming was easier as the police understood what we were trying to achieve and we had support from people who’d been involved in the first series. But at times it was still difficult to find people on the ground, who wanted to be filmed. The terror threat means many police officers don’t want to draw attention to themselves by appearing on television.

One of the most astounding stories we covered was a case that can’t be shown in the series, due to reporting restrictions. It involved a child who hadn’t been seen for 10 years and his remains were found in a shed in his mother’s garden. His mother was arrested and we followed Homicide detective who worked for days to try and understand what had happened.

We were shocked at the number of teenagers and young adults carrying knives and how everyday it is for police to attend to stabbings in some boroughs. We found it depressing at times at the lack of cooperation between the police and the victims, due to fear of reprisals and a lack of faith in the justice system.

We were also with Firearms Officers when they carried out an armed stop, a controversial tactic used as a final attempt to stop a car when they think there’s a gun in it. It’s a tactic that’s gone wrong in the past and a cause of much distrust between the police and some communities.

Making any police series means you have to work within the constraints and timescales of the justice system and sometimes this can mean that your stories don’t make it to air in time. Frustratingly, we lost some of our favorite and most important stories because of this.

The stories of crime may be ones that tap into our deepest fears and at times show the worst of humanity, but there are social issues at the heart of most of them and we hope these narratives have the power to change things for the better.

Shona Thompson is the series producer of 'The Met - Policing London'.

• 'The Met - Policing London' is broadcast on Wednesdays at 9pm on BBC One with previous episodes available to watch on BBC iPlayer

Well, what a surreal night it was. I remember after I received my invite, speaking to a friend on the phone about going and them saying “just be prepared, it’s a long one, and theres no booze until after!’

Firstly, nothing prepares you for the gladiatorial set up at the O2, it’s a vast place but it’s grandeur is enhanced by the way they seat the ticket buying public around the outside (and up into the gods) and the nominees/celebs/production companies on the ground in the middle. Walking in you are hit with a wall of noise and there are people it seems everywhere including directly above your head.

Anyway, we were sat at the very front (a good sign I thought until I spotted all others in our category also on the same row) which meant we had great seats to watch Dermot and Sir Tom absolutely smash the opening number.

And so onto our win! It genuinely was surprising to win our category against such stiff and popular competition. I was clearly that surprised that I went into common sense rejection mode and decided as I was sat nearest the stage i’d get on up there and not hang around, which meant when I actually arrived at the top of the stairs I had to change direction as I certainly wasn’t going to accept the award and do the speech! So I headed over to the safety of Dermot O’leary and shook his hand instead.

After your win you are ushered into the vortex of the O2’s tunnels and you go from room to room, from mini stage to mini stage, to talk to various press about the show and how you feel about your award, but there’s now booze! Which obviously helps you to find more inventive ways of answering the same question over and over again.

We also bumped into the legend that is Mary Berry, and she’s a fan of the show! Which means everything. What a lovely lady she is. I got a selfie of course.

The media circus takes so long that you don’t really get a chance to go back into the awards which is a shame, but they have these brilliant students who are all dressed to impress and they sit in your vacant seats so the ceremony always looks well attended.

Anyway at some point the awards end and the now fairly thirsty crowd gets to go bonkers on the dance floor surrounded by free food and refreshment, and this is the part where stories are made,

Thank you to everyone who voted for us so we could enjoy a memorable night and we are very proud that Call the Midwife got some of the Kudos it richly deserves.

Jack Ashton is an actor and plays Tom Hereward in Call The Midwife.

• Series 6 of Call The Midwife is broadcast on Sundays on BBC One and availbale to watch on BBC iPlayer.
• Listen to Jack Ashton speaking to Lucy Tegg about his Bristolian roots on BBC Radio Bristol.
• Other BBC wins at the National Television Awards 2017:

               Best Drama - Casualty 

               Serial Drama Performance - Lacey Turner, Eastenders

               Best Comedy - Mrs Brown's Boys

               Best TV Judge - Mary Berry, Great British Bake Off

               Special Recognition Award - Graham Norton

               Best Drama Performance - Sarah Lancashire, Happy Valley

               Best Talent Show - Strictly Come Dancing 

There is a ‘matter of factness’ in the way contributors tell their story, so is the emotional reaction rooted in our own projection?

I think it is perhaps the fact that we cannot help but be moved, hearing many of the individual stories for the first time ever. However, for the survivors, who have experienced so much loss, they have wept all their tears over the past seven decades and can be quite stoic about it now. When you look at documentaries on the Holocaust you see images of horror on such an enormous scale that it’s overwhelming, people don’t seem like individuals, they are statistics in a way. But that changes when you actually meet somebody like Axel and hear a very personal story. You come to understand that he was an only child when he came over on the Kindertransport and then both his parents, who had to remain behind, killed themselves rather than go to Auschwitz. Here he is as a man in his late eighties, telling us his story of being all alone, a young boy in England with nobody.

How do you verify the stories?

There are some stories you can verify easily because people like Sir Nicholas Winton, who brought so many children over from Prague on the Kindertransport, kept meticulous notes and records. So there are records to a degree, but also I think what we were relying on was family stories. For example the children of the survivors of the holocaust whose parents passed on their stories to them. Together these descendants of some of these survivors made memory quilts to pass on their stories to future generations. Of course it also goes without saying that we had our commentary checked by an academic for cultural and historical accuracy.

At the time the Holocaust was happening there was a lot of chaos. Some of the children were very young and some of the facts might have been confused, they might also have been told sanitised versions, to protect them.  Zahava - didn't know that her mother had kept so many artefacts from their experiences in Bergen-Belsen because her mother was keen that she live her life without this enormous great shadow over it and wasn’t reminded on a daily basis of her time at Belsen. It was only when Zahava's mother died that they found all the items in the attic.

It struck me that there wasn't much dialogue, and the information wasn’t overwhelming and yet the detail I was provided with was striking enough for it me to have such an emotional reaction....

The survivors were incredibly eloquent, what they had to say was powerful. They were quite difficult pieces to edit for broadcast because we allowed a fair amount of time for each recording and each story could almost have been an hour in its own right. But we had to take them down to short interviews. What we decided to do was to look at the Holocaust as a whole and tell the stories in chronological order, from Judith Kerr's fleeing in 1933, right up to liberation and post liberation. Each piece told a specific period of a family's or individual's story.

I worked very closely with assistant producer Sophie Wogden. We visited most of the contributors in their homes before the filming. We wanted to ensure that they would be comfortable telling their stories on camera - for some it was the first time - and that they understood what we were asking them to do, so that they weren't made vulnerable in any way. 

I'm thinking a lot about the board game…

When I first came across that board game it was in the Wiener Library in Russell Square. It stops you in your tracks because you can't believe that non-Jewish German families were sitting down to play a board game called 'Jews Out’, encouraging their children to have this whole attitude of the Jews being evil and bad and something to be gotten rid of. While they were playing these games at home, in schools the Jewish children were being segregated. Jewish children were being made to sit at the back of classrooms or even sent to different schools completely, the teachers were ridiculing them, it's horrific really.

You made a quite understandable decision not to value the items that were brought to the programme, but what currency do those items have?

At the start Fiona Bruce says that they are, historically, priceless. It feels quite clichéd but they genuinely are. For example, the pair of striped trousers from Auschwitz, the material cost nothing, but when you come into contact with a pair of those trousers having seen the images of people wearing them in concentration camps, they are incredibly poignant and potent. When I met up with the owner Sybil before filming and she handed them to me I felt a mixture of awe and respect and horror all at the same time. You almost want to get rid of them, or put them down, or hand them on as quickly as you can, and yet you know that they are such a stark reminder of the holocaust that you can't help but be drawn to them at the same time on a very human level.

Were there contributors who were reluctant to participate?

I think a lot of the survivors want to make sure their story is told. Some of the contributors that we interviewed came via the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and they had given their testimony for the new archive, which is due to be built and therefore had already spoken about their experiences. We put out an appeal on the Antiques Roadshow in October inviting people to get in touch with us if they would like to be involved and we had a tremendous response. We had several hundred people get in contact, so there were enough people who wanted to be involved and who wanted to share their stories.

How did the process change you?

I thought I knew a fair amount about the Holocaust, but working on the programme made me realise how little I actually knew. I found it a very humbling experience. It really made me think in real terms about how some of the contributors had lived through the most horrific times. I was taken by how these survivors managed to carry on, after suffering so much, often having lost their families, starting again with nothing, building themselves a new life in Britain and creating their own families.

When you are making a film like this, you are really immersed in it – for example, I spent time watching a great deal of horrific archive footage then went back into the edit suite, carried on editing, putting the programme together and was being very matter-of-fact about what we were producing. The next day, I had to give a presentation to our department about the programme and as I started to talk about the programme in front of a room full of people, I started to choke up as I told some of the stories. At that point I realised that it does affect you, of course, these human stories of family members who have been killed. You realise how close to home it could be. It could have been your mother, your son, your brother. 

The Antiques Roadshow Holocaust Memorial is on BBC One on 15 January at 7.30pm

Just before Christmas I attended a screening of the first episode of Let It Shine, 'hot out of the edit suite'. BBC Studios’ Controller of Entertainment Commissioning, Kate Phillips introduced the programme as irreverent, funny and emotional and that if the show were a stick of rock, it would have BBC running through it.

Having watched it, I can quite happily agree with Phillips’ introduction. The dry humour that presenters Graham Norton and Mel Giedroyc bring gives respite from the nerves and anticipation of the auditions. The family-friendly entertainment combined with the chemistry between the judges and presenters makes Let It Shine a real ensemble piece.

Applicants are treated with respect, with each performer given feedback and encouragement, whether they were chosen to go through to the next stage or not. The show is refreshingly self-aware and respectful of the talent it is unearthing, as Barlow notes: “It’s the one thing, when we’re planning a show like this, what we can’t anticipate is the talent…now we’ve seen those performances, all of a sudden the show has come to life… with these programmes it is all about the talent”.

Presenters and judges (minus Amber Riley, due to some small matter of a press night for Dreamgirls) participated in a Q and A at the end of the press conference. I confess to being easily starstruck, and although I am very much a 'grunge' girl at heart, the thought of being in the same room as bona fide popstars Kemp, Minogue and Barlow was highly exciting, but the real treat was seeing Mel Giedroyc having been a huge fan of Mel (and Sue) since their Light Lunch days. The camaraderie between Giedroyc and co-host Graham Norton is a beautiful thing. Listen to their experiences working on the show, in the clip below:

Oh yes, and Kate’s introduction mentioned the show was emotional. Now, I’m not the least cynical of people but I definitely welled up watching episode one. At least twice. In a good way.

Be prepared for a goosebumpy ride.

Jen Macro is Digital Content Producer for About the BBC.

• Let It Shine begins on Saturday 7 January at 7pm, on BBC One.
• Read more about Let It Shine on the BBC Media Centre.

Sally Wainwright's new drama To Walk Invisible takes a new look at the Brontë family, three remarkable women who came from obscurity to produce some of the greatest novels in the English language. Charley Stone spoke to production designer Grant Montgomery to discover how the Brontës' world was recreated for the series.

Three strong Yorkshire women, living in a remote place with a brother who goes off the rails… sounds like the plot for a Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Last Tango In Halifax) drama, right? Correct: To Walk Invisible is her story of the Brontë sisters, and their rise from obscurity to become the renowned authors of works such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

I recognised Haworth parsonage, the Brontës’ home, right from the opening scenes, having visited there many years ago. But how do you get permission to shoot a film over several weeks in what is now a working museum? Well, you don’t. Instead, the interior of the house was recreated in a studio in Manchester, but the famous exterior and surroundings were built on a car park about half a mile outside Haworth – on a fake hill!

“The parsonage is on a hill, and it had a very particular gradient, so we had to build some of the hill on a huge scaffold rig,” explains production designer Grant Montgomery.

“There’s a shot at the start of the film, where Charlotte Brontë is going up to the house, and she’s going past the graveyard, and all the flagstones are wet – that’s all fake. It’s real flagstones that we put down, but it’s not a real location – it’s an MDF skin over a scaffold rig, with a house on top.”

Not just the house, but the graveyard and the side of the church, as it would have been during the Brontës' lives, together with another house and barn which no longer exist, were all created on the makeshift hill.

“The walls are plaster walls painted to look like stone – and you’ll notice there are no trees, because the trees were planted after the Brontës, when the Reverend Wade took over the parsonage after Patrick Brontë died. We shot down a bit of actual Haworth street, but we changed all the shops back to the exact shops that were there at the time.”

Grant explained how they had 12 weeks to research and prep everything before filming began, and how every detail had to match the house as it was when the Brontës were living there.

“Because it’s such an iconic literary shrine, you have to get all of that detail right. It was in Sally’s script, that it was the parsonage without the Wade extension, so you couldn’t really do it any other way but to actually go and build it from scratch. For example, the size of the hallway is wider in our film, because Charlotte made her bedroom and the parlour larger after the death of Anne.”

“Sally wanted that authenticity. We built the piano in the front room that Emily played, because it’s a very distinctive piano. We recreated all the books that were on the bookshelves, and all the pictures on the wall, and all the flagstones in the hallway were measured exactly from the original parsonage, and even the handrail.

“But Sally wanted it to feel like it was a house that people actually lived in, so there are scratches and bashes on the woodwork. And I wanted the audience to feel that it was real, as real as we could make it.”

Watching the film, I did feel totally immersed in the Brontës’ world, and it gave me new insight into their inspiration.

“Being at the set build when snow would come through, rain would come through – because you’re really high up, amongst the moors, which gives it an incredible look. And you began to understand why they wrote what they wrote, remembering descriptions of them all sitting in the parlour, when they could hear the wind howl outside the house, and you suddenly realise they were right at the top of Haworth, looking right out onto the moor. So why wouldn’t they be writing things like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre?”

“Sally’s written a great script, I loved reading it. I kept re-reading it while I was making it and thoroughly enjoying it. It was a great journey to take. It was a privilege, I really mean that - it was an extraordinary piece of work to do. I’d always wanted to film a Brontë story - I think they’re an amazing family - and I kept thinking ‘I really want to meet them!’. I just hope everyone enjoys it.”

To Walk Invisible is on BBC One at 9pm on Thursday 29 December

A new BBC One Drama My Mother and Other Strangers, starts on Sunday 13 November. Set in Northern Ireland during World War Two, it follows the fortunes of the Coyne family and their neighbours as they struggle to maintain a normal life after a huge United States Army Air Force (USAAF) airfield, with 4,000 service men and women, lands in the middle of their rural parish. Writer Barry Devlin blogs about his background and how he came to create the drama.

I was born after the Second World War in the parish of Ardboe, a flat alluvial region on the western shore of Lough Neagh: the nearest high ground was Slieve Gallion 20 miles away: fishing for eels was the livelihood of 60% of the parish.

Ardboe was unremarkable except for two things. It had one of the finest Celtic crosses to be found anywhere in Ireland, dating from the ninth century and it had a vast airbase slap bang in its middle, dating from 1942.

USAAF Station 238 – Cluntoe airfield - was a Combat Crew Replacement Centre which trained B17 and B 24 pilots to fly in the cloudy skies over Europe. It was a big base with more than 4,000 servicemen stationed within its perimeter. The Americans left in late 1944 but the RAF took over and No 2 Flying Training Centre stayed there until 1955.

That’s the version of Cluntoe that I remember vividly. The way home from school ran along the perimeter of the airfield and the planes took off and landed directly overhead.

It was impossible not to be excited by how low they flew, so close that every panel and oil streak and stencil mark was visible, so close that the faces of the instructors and the (sometimes whey- faced) students could be clearly seen.

To this day I can still remember the fluttery burble of the Gypsy engines of the Prentices and the vivid rasp of the radial engined Harvards (the ones with the hole in the nose, as the local boys called them).

Even more unforgettable were the heart-stopping moments when the Harvard engines cut out at the top of a loop directly above and it seemed like they might never start… and then the reassuring chainsaw buzz as they headed off across the lough.

Those are my memories. 

But there were other memories in play: the recollections of my mother and father and of the local men and women who vividly remembered the Yanks: even my oldest two sisters, Anne and Marie had been taken for a quick taxi in a bomber on VE day and sent home laden with goodies by the jubilant airmen.

It was these stories – and the sense of loss that permeated them at the way the parish had been divided and the community at its centre had been uprooted and moved - that started me thinking about a series set in the period when the airfield was at its busiest.

I imagined a family facing two ways: outwards, towards the airfield and its exciting but hugely intrusive new life: and inwards towards the parish which had remained the same in essence for hundreds of years.

My father owned a pub and I remember the RAF officers who came to drink there, sometimes bringing their wives: the locals drank there too and sometimes - packing bottles for my father - I caught a glimpse of the incongruity of two sets of lives in a juxtaposition desired by neither and often heightened by the ongoing matter of the Six Counties and Irish nationhood.

So I made Michael Coyne a publican/farmer. My mother was a teacher and so I made Rose Coyne a teacher. I knew the body language, as it were, of both occupations backwards, so writing their diurnal tasks was easy: second nature.

At the same time I took care to distance my creations from these people whom I knew so well.

Rose Coyne is English: wilful and volatile and exotic: a blow in, a stranger. She is a creature entirely of my imagination.

Michael is closer to my father in that he is a local hero. But my father’s moral compass was even stronger than Michael’s: he did what was right whatever people thought about its wisdom or utility.

There was no Emma. I had six sisters but none of them is a bit like the geeky ingénue of the series.

If anyone is close to a person who really existed, it’s probably Francis: geeky, priggish, wanting to be loved and usually a yard or two off the pace. Now, what small boy does that remind me of..?

My Mother and Other Strangers, starts at 9pm  on Sunday 13 November on BBC One.

Barry Devlin is writer, My Mother and Other Strangers

• Read the press pack on the Media Centre

Executive Producer John Yorke blogs about the journey from page to screen as a five-part drama series based on the detective novel by Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, comes to BBC One as part of the #LovetoRead season.

When I sat down with scriptwriters Rachel Flowerday and Sasha Hails to find a novel to adapt for the BBC Love to Read season, our focus was always going to be choosing a story that had really captivated us.

Not just a literary classic that deserved a new life on screen, but also a genuine page-turner that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up; an extraordinary and compulsive piece of storytelling that stays with you over the years. Rachel had read The Moonstone 20 years ago, and it was still the first idea in her mind when we started discussing potential adaptations.

Of course there’s something else very special about The Moonstone. Crime stories are a staple of fiction all over the world – it’s hard to imagine our television schedules, or bookshelves, without them. But before 1868, the English detective novel just didn’t exist. Then Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone – and an entire genre was born.

In Franklin Blake, the gentleman detective first drew breath; in Sergeant Cuff, we first saw the world-weary professional investigator; The Verinders’ Yorkshire home is the prototype for every country house mystery ever written… Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age murder mysteries, Raymond Chandler, PD James, Patricia Cornwell and TV shows from Midsomer Murders to CSI all owe their debt to Collins’ groundbreaking work.

It’s not ‘just’ a crime story, however. In parallel, The Moonstone is a powerful romance: Collins hit on the brilliant conceit of tying the fate of the missing diamond to Franklin’s quest to win the heart of Rachel Verinder, the woman he loves. It matters desperately that the diamond’s been stolen – not because it is valuable, but because the shadow of the theft hangs over the Verinder family, and destroys their trust and former happiness. And alongside the love story, The Moonstone is also an astonishingly modern commentary on Colonialism, the English class system, religion and the position of women in society.

The theft of the Moonstone – the crime that incites the novel’s action – actually happens twice; it’s stolen from our heroine, Rachel Verinder, but long before that, as the prologue relates, it was stolen by her uncle from its home in India. The diamond is a symbol of all Colonial plunder – and we’re left in no doubt that Wilkie Collins stands with the dispossessed.

So the choice of novel was the easy part… Next we faced the challenge of translating the novel’s groundbreaking epistolary form – where a series of fallible narrators write their testimony about the build-up to, and aftermath of, the theft of the priceless Moonstone – to the screen.

Rather than opt for a linear retelling of the story, we decided to reflect The Moonstone’s narrative structure by having Franklin interview the key characters. One serendipitous result of this was that it pulled some of the revelations into the present day of the novel. We see Franklin find out about some events in Rachel’s life as they happen, and react strongly to that – which makes him much more active as a hero. Hopefully our audience will be on the edge of their seats as they wait, with Franklin, to discover the fate of the Moonstone – and his heart…

We faced tricky production issues too, from grumpy horses and bouncy dogs that just didn’t want to ‘sleep’, to beach locations that had changed beyond recognition between recce and shoot, to safety issues with rising tides. The prologue to the novel takes place in India 50 years previously, but we didn’t have the substantial budget needed to recreate that set-piece location – so we came up with a creative solution to represent the story in a manner that felt true to the era and tone, using a Victorian paper theatre and a little girl telling a story that’s been handed down through the generations…

The sequence where one character retrieves a box from deep within the quicksand of the Shivering Sands was also a real test. Without giving away spoilers, the incoming tide, a narrowing beach, and loss of daylight meant our actors, and director Lisa Mulcahy, had to rise to an immense challenge… as did the writers, who rewrote the sequence to use the conditions we were now faced with on the day.

There’s much in the novel, though, where we didn’t need to change a word. Writers Rachel and Sasha found working with Collins’ amazing characterisation a gift – many of the key scenes are constructed entirely from original dialogue – and he’s a consummate storyteller.

Like Charles Dickens, Collins was writing for publication in installments, so he knew just how to hook an audience in. His mantra for writing was ‘make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’ – and it certainly holds true for The Moonstone. Brilliant comic characterisations such as house-steward Gabriel Betteredge, and Evangelical spinster Miss Clack, are juxtaposed with heart-breaking tragedy in housemaid Rosanna’s story arc.

It’s an emotional rollercoaster with numerous twists and turns along the way – and we can’t wait to introduce a new audience to the jewel that is The Moonstone.

The Moonstone is on BBC One from Monday 31 October.

• This blog originally appeared on the #LovetoRead website.

Of course many great books have been dramatised for television or the big screen – but it’s not as easy to make a programme about the book itself. Talking about the printed word can make for heavy viewing. So we set out to make programmes about books that celebrate the places we know and love – and to see how novelists have been influenced by the people and locations around them.

Suggs for example looks at books that depict the early isolation and bewilderment that moving to London can bring – from Oliver Twist’s first impressions of the city to Moses description of people living in their own “little worlds” in Samuel Shelvey’s Lonely Londoners.

Dramatic pictures of the Cornish coast fill the screen in the South West’s programme. Presenter Chris Packham looks at how The Wind in the Willows – started as a series of letters from Kenneth Grahame to his son – and explores how the landscape has influenced popular historial romances like Winston Graham’s Poldark and Daphne Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek.

The works of Sue Townsend, Beatrix Potter, Dorothy L Sayers, Dick Francis, Catherine Cookson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Philip Larkin are among the dozens of writers featured in the programmes.

Part of the BBC’s Love To Read campaign, and made by BBC English Regions working with BBC Learning and BBC Four, we’re really proud of these programmes – make sure you don’t miss the edition that’s about books around you.

Stuart Thomas is Head of English Regions Programmes.

• Books That Made Britain is broadcast in England on Sunday 16 October at 3.45pm on BBC One

John Lennon declares the Beatles "bigger than Jesus".

England win the World Cup.

And Time Magazine calls London "Swinging" - in what would become the word that defined a decade.

But 1966 wasn't all about the capital. And it wasn’t all about football. All over the country, things were changing, and they were changing fast.

I hadn’t been born in 1966, but for most of my life I’ve been immersed in the cultural impact of that year. I grew up watching Star Trek which first aired in the US in ’66 – as did other childhood favourites of mine The Monkees, The Time Tunnel and Mission: Impossible. It was also the year that a number of incredible songs were hits – including the extraordinary Beatles classic Eleanor Rigby. Many of the hits of ‘66 I play regularly now on my phone, still marveling at a technology that back then would have seemed just impossibly far fetched.

So to mark a half century passing, we decided to make a programme in every region of England, celebrating 1966 and the changes it brought about.

They’re a fascinating selection of films.

In the West Midlands, Adrian Chiles discovers how new arrivals battled racism in everyday life.

In the South East, Simon Fanshawe visits my old university – then a new university – in Canterbury. In the East Midlands Robert Lindsay remembers life in Nottingham while Stuart Maconie uncovers a world of casinos, strip joints, slum clearances and women’s lib in the North West.

Then, of course, there is the capital of the swinging sixties where Patsy Kensit explores what it was really like in London using five of her favourite photographs from the time.

Wherever you are in England, you’ll find Living in ’66 a wonderful reminder of a world now gone, but not totally forgotten. Frankly the great thing about making a TV programme about the mid sixties is that there was colour everywhere – and the music was sensational – which are quite simply a programme maker’s dream. If I was to think of 1956 I’d imagine black and white pictures and prim and proper people – think 1976 and I’d imagine beige outfits and an economic crisis – both a far cry from the exuberance, the colour and the change of the mid-sixties.

There's a unique perspective to explore with regional programmes like these - an opportunity to see the transformation of inner city areas to huge changes in transport and education. Do be sure to watch to find out – or to help you remember – what it was like 'Living in ’66'.

Stuart Thomas is Head of English Regions Programmes

• Living in ’66 airs on BBC One in England at 7.30pm on Wednesday 1 June, 2016 and all regional programmes will be available to watch on iPlayer for 30 days after broadcast.
• Read more about the programme on the Media Centre website.

In the documentary 'A Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited' journalist and British Muslim Myriam François-Cerrah travels to Bosnia, to mark the 20th anniversary of the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II. In a frequently emotional trip, she visits the site of the genocide at Srebrenica, with a group of young people all born in the year of the massacre. Here producer/director Gillian Bancroft talks about the challenges of making a film about a genocide that isn’t well remembered.

In the early 1990s I travelled to the former Yugoslavia with the British Red Cross to make a short film about refugees. They were fleeing the fighting that was tearing apart this popular holiday destination and which eventually led to independence for states like Bosnia. It’s a trip I’ll never forget but I’m ashamed to say that over the years my memory of the wider conflict had faded. I’m not alone. Ask people what they remember about Srebrenica in 1995 and few may have an answer. We needed to find a way to tell the story of a genocide that many had forgotten and convey the importance of events understood by very few.

On the 11th July 1995, General Ratko Mladić led the Bosnian Serb Army into the spa town of Srebrenica, despite its designation as a UN safe area. In the days that followed, around eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and teenage boys were systematically massacred and buried in mass graves. Women, children and elderly were forcibly deported. Many suffered terrible abuse.

Today a British charity - Remembering Srebrenica - takes small groups to Bosnia to learn the lessons of this genocide. Chatting to the organisers I discovered that they sometimes take young people who know nothing about Srebrenica. Our viewers could discover the story afresh with one of these groups and reflect with them on whether it has any relevance for us here in Britain today. The film would stand or fall on the strength of their three-day visit to Bosnia.

As soon as I spoke to the young people, some of my natural anxieties eased. The diverse group included Julie, the daughter of Colonel Bob Stewart who was United Nations Commander of the British forces in Bosnia in the early nineties; and medical student Abdul, who said he was astonished that he didn’t hear about the story in school and wondered why “…when Muslim people die you don’t learn about it as much”. Journalist and British Muslim Myriam François-Cerrah would go with them as our presenter. She understood that for a lot of British Muslims Srebrenica is still a very raw issue. This is a genocide that struck Europe’s oldest Muslim community and Europe failed to stop it.

The journey that followed was incredible. We visited the old battery factory just north of Srebrenica where UN peacekeepers were stationed in the 1990s. It’s now a Memorial Centre where we met a survivor of the so-called ‘Column’ of men and boys who had attempted to escape the advancing Bosnian Serb Army by walking to a region under Bosnian Muslim control. But it became a death march. I knew that a key moment for the group would be when they were shown a film detailing the three days that followed the fall of Srebrenica.

The Bosnian Serb Army filmed its own actions - including the execution of many unarmed men and boys - and some of this footage is used in the film. My job at this point was to record the reactions of the young people. I didn’t actually watch the film myself. Even so the experience left its mark.

The atmosphere in the room was palpable; focusing on the expressions of the young people watching I found myself feeling physically sick. One of young group, Abdul, had to leave. He said the similar ages of the victims left him thinking about himself - ‘ you and your friend and your brother. You’re all together in a van together and you know you are about to die.’ Our presenter Myriam commented that the images are likely to stay in the mind and ‘if something positive can come from learning about that you’ve got to hope it was worth it.’

From there the young people went straight to meet the ‘Mothers of Srebrenica’. These women each lost members of their family, husbands and sons, in the massacre. The rain never stopped falling as the group walked arm in arm with the mothers around the memorial cemetery – row upon row of white markers, one for each of the thousands who died.

Myriam and the young people went on to confront the current Bosnian Serb President of Srebrenica’s Municipal Assembly, who refuses to accept that what happened here in 1995 should be termed a genocide. Finally we travelled to the mortuary where on-going forensic work is still identifying the victims 20 years later.

It was a very intense few days. We watched the young people learn first-hand how easily prejudice can take hold, even their own, and then realize for themselves why this story has such important lessons for us in multicultural Britain today. Summing up the trip Myriam said:

‘What struck me about the young people on this journey was not only their realisation that they had been blind to what happened in Srebrenica, but in many cases that it made them much more conscious of the danger of divisions much closer to home."

Gillian Bancroft is producer/director, A Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited

• A Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited will be broadcast on BBC One on Monday July 6 at 10.35pm and will be available to watch on BBC iPlayer for 30 days thereafter.
• Find out about 20th anniversary memorial events around the UK at the Remembering Srebrenica website.