The programme’s development team went around a number of places, but what they found with Redcar was that the people were really willing to talk because they wanted to talk about the issues that mattered most to them.

What better place to go to than where people want to talk to you, and want to tell you about how proud they are about their town?

Although there were those who wanted to talk to us, trying to find narratives that explain the bigger picture was quite difficult, as we met with about 400 people, not including the many hellos and brief conversations.

I ended up going up with the people I got on well with, and fortunately their stories turned into what being young’s all about - falling in love for the first time, moving away from home, getting exam results, these are huge things in your life.

The first filming started in November 2016, and for the team it wasn’t easy being away from their families and friends for a long time as there was a lot of filming at weekends.

A real high point was seeing some of the young people achieve their dreams, and the realisation for me that they’re amazing in their ability to adapt, to increase their ambition, and to do things that they didn’t think they could do.

But we had to constantly reassure the town to keep faith with us, that we weren’t going to represent them unfairly, and that we were making something objective that understands that love of where you are from: home is always home.

When you can’t show someone the final product because you’re in the middle of making it, that’s tough - people have to genuinely trust you, and have to have faith in you and the entire team worked hard to foster that.

It’s an anxious process, someone saying ‘film me for six months’, because the gloss goes away after a couple of days. But what’s good is that you get to see people change, and in this they shine.

Sometimes, with programmes on a similar territory, people in Redcar had felt it had been an unfair representation of a town, and we all felt it was important that the Redcar they saw in this was one they recognised.

It’s a big responsibility to show what real life is like for different parts of the UK, and any time anyone shows anything to do with working class towns, it’s looked down on, and that saddens me as I think being working class is something to be proud of.

When you think of Kes and Cathy Come Home and what used to be called kitchen sink dramas, you remember the pride people had and I wanted to show in some small way that this pride hasn’t died in places like Redcar.

The people of Redcar have massive amounts of love for where they come from, so I think it’s great that the BBC allowed us to do this in a way that is a true reflection. I did the filming along with Stuart Bernard and Jonny Ashton, and we benefited from the amount of time that we had to make this series. You can spend time getting lovely shots of places, and getting to know the town and the people really well.

When the title comes up on every episode, there’s a shot of a drone going over the Eston Hills. That was a logistical nightmare in terms of getting access, and on a good day with the sun just about to set - you’ve only got one chance to do it! And then also being hounded by other drone operators who can find you by geolocation. I learned a lot about logistics.

Filming something as huge as The Mighty Redcar is not always going to be perfect, but that’s kind of the beauty of making documentaries, it's real life and some of the things we filmed you’d not have been able to write in a drama.

I remain immensely grateful for the producers’ research, the talented, hard-working crew that 72 Films provided us with, the editors who managed to find a clear vision from what had been filmed, and of course, and always, the people of Redcar.

The Mighty Redcar begins on 6 September at 9pm on BBC Two.

Britain’s Jewish community has recently been the focus of widespread attention.

There is concern about antisemitism, particularly online, and fierce debate within the Jewish community about how it should best relate to Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians.

To many on the outside, it may seem that Britain’s Jews speak with one voice, but on the inside, the community is not just diverse, but also on some of the key issues, divided.

As a British Jew myself, I felt passionately about making a series that would demonstrate that diversity and division, getting under the skin of some of the most difficult challenges facing the community today.

When Lion were commissioned by BBC Two to produce the series we decided the best way to do this would be to take a small group of British Jews on an immersive journey, first to Manchester - home to the largest Jewish community outside of London - and then to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where they would meet Israelis and Palestinians, learning what is really like for them on the ground.

Our first challenge was to find a group of people who helped to reflect the plurality of voices in the British Jewish community to take part in the series. Perhaps the hardest to cast were the most religious and the most politically active.

Many Orthodox Jews don’t watch television and some are suspicious of the media. A lot of those we spoke to were worried they might be taken out of context in the finished programmes. At the other end people who had spoken out against the government of Israel were equally sceptical.

After months of searching, we found eight clever, thoughtful people who were prepared to talk about their beliefs and values as individuals and as a group.

At the same time as finding the contributors, we had to come up with an itinerary that would allow the group to explore the challenges at home and in Israel.

We wanted to take the group to see places and people that would help them to go on an emotional as well as a physical journey. We wanted them to engage with people some of them might see as their fiercest opponents, and hoped that by meeting each other, there would be insight that everyone could gain. We wondered if this insight might make some of the group start to think differently about being British and Jewish and about how they relate to Israel.

To plan our itinerary, we consulted far and wide, working with a team of consultants with a diverse range of voices throughout the production of the series: from an orthodox Rabbi, Nicky Liss of Highgate Synagogue, to Laura Marks, the founder of Mitzvah Day, a Jewish led charity that encourages people of all faiths to work together, and Raymond Simonson, the CEO of Britain’s only Jewish Arts and Cultural Centre, JW3. Also working as consultants were Jewish blogger, Robert Cohen, and Sally Halon, UK Programme Director at the UJIA in Manchester.

And we didn’t stop there. We spoke to other organisations in Britain, in Israel and Palestinian groups to make sure we would reflect properly some of the themes addressed in the series.

Back home after filming, our challenge was to edit the many hours of material we had into two hour long films to be broadcast over two consecutive nights - all this as the story of antisemitism in Britain was creeping higher and higher up the news agenda.

For everyone involved, from the contributors, to those they met, and the very many people working on the production, this has been a really important and meaningful project to be involved with, and one we all felt a huge obligation to get right.

I hope that whatever perspective viewers come at it from, they will come away with the realisation that the British Jewish community, whilst thriving, has a host of challenges to grapple with.

Solving them won’t ever easy, not least because, as Sylvia, the grandmother of the group says in programme one: “Everybody thinks they are right, that’s because they are all Jewish”.

We Are British Jews begins on Tuesday 4 September. 

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From our point of view, we think Only Connect fulfils, more than most other quizzes, the ideal balance of seeming to baffle - but then being surprisingly accessible. It is play-along mental exercise and it feels enormously good to get a question right. Because of the huge range of subjects, it’s quite possible that a viewer at home will know a question which completely bamboozles the teams.

I also think that Only Connect questions can contain something beautiful, and viewers can often see the effort and the artistry that’s gone into them, and they like that. 

How many people write for the show?

JWC: There are 27 different credited writers for series 13, though well over half of the questions have been written by the Question Editors and the Senior Writers (6 people in total).

Victoria occasionally contributes entire questions, though more often her involvement is in some fine-tuning. She is particularly good at envisaging how a question might play out in studio and she often makes suggestions for how we can mitigate something potentially tricky cropping up, or increase the chances of something exciting happening.

We’re always amazed by the intellect behind the connections, but what makes a good question and do you always know when you’ve written a good one?

DM: The ideal connection brings together things that seem utterly random, from totally different areas, to all make sense in the end. We love crossover of subject matter in a question. But, equally, a great question can sometimes be something pretty simple about numbers, or songs, or people. 

I’m not sure I actually do know when I’ve written a good question. I often get excited about a question idea I’ve had which, on closer inspection, is shown not to work at all. And sometimes a question which seems mundane can be elevated to a whole new level with a very minor tweak. That’s why it’s good to work on things together. 

JWC: Only Connect is famous for being hard – really hard – but the very best questions, in my view, are the ones which everyone feels they could have got. In other words, much of the subject matter of the question is familiar, but it’s the making the connection which is the difficult bit. The clip below shows a good example, in a question from series 1, which asks what comes fourth after: Wheat, Sett, Cease…

What different considerations are there for each question?

DM: Order is of the utmost importance. It can be a little counterintuitive. Rather than putting the most “obscure” clue first, it often works better to start with one that gives less away, or is more ambiguous or mysterious. Something obscure, if recognised, can be a big giveaway.

Precise wording and punctuation can also make a huge difference e.g. if a clue says something like 2000 Olympics, Olympics: 2000, Olympics in 2000 etc. it’s surprising how those little differences can be vital

Changes to layout can come quite late, when we see what the questions are going to look like on the screens in the studio and at home.

Sometimes font size and colour can play a part too, even the number of lines that the clues are displayed on. We’re working on the experience being fair for the player and accessible for the viewer.

JWC: We talk quite a bit about the question answering “journey” – we want different clues to give little nudges here and there, we try very hard to avoid too many situations where it is “either you know it or you don’t”: that isn’t really what Only Connect is about.

How many questions get written in total to edit it down to the number used for each series?

JWC: Questions get pitched before they are written up in full form for the show. For series 13, we looked at pitches for about 1600 questions, of which about 550 were written up, and 444 were used (this is just for Round 1 and Round 2).

Is there much editing between writing the question and it appearing on screen?

JWC: The process is pretty detailed. Question writers send in their pitches; David and I review the pitches to form a shortlist; Jenny Hawker, the series Producer, reviews the shortlist; we send back the survivors from those initial reviews to the question writers who give them the full treatment (checking sources, finding supporting information etc.); these are then submitted for us to check again; then they are reviewed by the team of verifiers who triple check all the facts; questions come back from the verifiers and are assembled into sets for each show.

Then the fun really begins with our day long question meetings when David and I, along with Jenny and Chris Stuart, the Executive Producer, go through every question together, making tweaks, and sometimes rejecting questions that we’re not convinced about. Once all that is done, Victoria looks at every question and provides her thoughts.

Every question gets several final sets of eyes on it on studio day from the graphics team, the producers, the question editors, and the host.

What are the OC team’s favourite questions of all time?

DM: Well, my favourite question was written by someone else – one of our new writers – and is in this year’s final. I can’t give anything away, though it will involve some physical activity by a contestant.

As for my own questions, I’m very satisfied when I can use different areas of my knowledge to first bamboozle people, only for them to get there in the end.

Then again, I submitted a music question which was in the closing stages of the last series which had songs by acts featuring the four husbands of Patsy Kensit. That went down very well.

JWC: I have far too many favourite questions. One that I like from series 13, mainly because it lives up to the archetype of “four seemingly random clues” (but also because of it starting with one of the easiest clues in the history of Only Connect) is:

Answer: Milk drinkers. It starts with a clue that any human in the world of almost any age would know, then follows it with three quite specific references. So we’re inviting the team to get the points as soon as they know one of the other cultural references (because of how easy clue 1 is). And the last clue is quite amusing.

Stats please…how many contestants have competed over the show’s 13 series and what are the highest and lowest scores?

JWC: There have been 218 teams on in total. One team name – Geocachers -  has been used by two separate teams, several years apart.

The highest ever score is 41, achieved by the Epicureans (the next highest score is 36). The lowest ever score was 4, by the (first) Geocachers. Honestly though, 4 is nothing to be ashamed of. Most people at home are punching the air in delight - and boasting about it on Twitter - if they get a single question correct.

How do you decide which episode to put a question in - do you always look out for a good subject spread?

JWC: It’s an art rather than a science. We try to place less difficult questions within episodes early in the series, and the harder ones towards the end to create a difficulty gradient throughout the series. But it is important for each episode to have a bit of variation in question difficulty – though in many ways that sorts itself out by ensuring there is a wide range of subjects covered in each episode.

You want each episode to have a good balance of puzzle-type questions, fact based questions, and different types of sequences from the more straightforward to the more lateral thinking. Additionally, we try to make sure that the questions “look different” to each other within a show as well. By that we mean trying to avoid both picture questions in a show being all pictures of people, or two number questions within a round that might look quite similar on screen.

Do contestants really dislike/perform worse the music questions?

JWC: Stats time again. In the history of Only Connect, the average score across all Round 1 questions is 1.25 points. The average score for music questions only is 1.15 points, and the average for picture questions only is 1.12. Compare these two then to the average score for the plain text based questions which is 1.32.

So yes, people do slightly worse on music questions, and the picture questions, with picture questions having a tiny bit lower of an average score. I think with music questions it is more a case of either loving them or hating them, but it is definitely a “thing” to at least appear to dislike the music question.

By comparison, on Round 2, the averages are:

• Overall: 1.35,
• Music only: 1.52 (though bear in mind that there have only ever been 36 Round 2 Music Questions),
• Pictures only: 1.27,
• Text questions only: 1.35

Do you ever worry you’ll run out of new material?

DM: I believe David Bodycombe, the first Question Editor, expressed understandable concerns that we’d run out after a few series. Yet the questions keep coming. It is generally agreed that Round 2 is the hardest one to find good, original material for, but the writers keep on coming up with the goods. 

As question setters, do you have to know everything about everything?

JWC: We wish. But I would say that knowing a little about a lot is very helpful in setting Only Connect questions, as it helps open up new avenues for research and finding perfect clues in unexpected places.

DM: Yes. Of course.

• The Only Connect Final airs on BBC Two on Monday 30 April  at 8pm and will be available to watch on BBC iPlayer for 30days after broadcast
  
• Follow @OnlyConnectQuiz on twitter
• Have a go at some of the 'Walls' from previous series of the show

Twenty-six year old Nicola was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy at the age of two. She is one of eight disabled job seekers whose stories are told in BBC Two’s Employable Me to take on the (seemingly impossible) challenge of finding employment. Nicola has a first-class honours degree in Multimedia Journalism and although she relies on her walking frame and lives with frequent pain, she is willing to do whatever it takes to prove to employers she’s got what it takes to be offered a full-time job. On the UN International Day of Persons with Disabilities Nicola reflects on her Employable Me experience.

If you had asked me a year ago about my life with cerebral palsy I’d have told you that it impacts on my movement and ability to get around. I would have probably told that there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t hurt because of my disability, and if you’d asked me in the right way I might have owned up to the fact that this gets me down sometimes. One thing I most definitely wouldn’t have accepted is that I feel my CP might be part of reason I haven’t had a job that wasn't freelance or an internship since I got my first-class honours degree five years ago.

Today though, I’d give you the real answers. More often than not my pain is so bad I wish I could remove various body parts, and I find the journey to a job interview far more nerve-wracking and difficult than the interview itself.

So, you may ask, what’s changed? It’s certainly not my disability. That’s life-long.

What's changed is me. For the past year I’ve been filmed for the second series of Employable Me on BBC Two. What started out for me as my way of raising awareness to help others, having long-since given up on my own job prospects, turned into the most important personal journey of my life.

For as long as I can remember, people have written me off; told me I would never do X or Y because of my disability, and I’ve always, always, proven them wrong, until my failed job hunt. My disability has never stopped me doing anything in my life (apart from being able to tie my shoelaces) and I absolutely did not want it to be reason for my unemployment. I wanted my failure to be as a result of something I can control.

I shielded the people who could give me a job from the reality of my cerebral palsy, but there is no way I could shield them from the electric blue walking frame or how unsteady I am on my feet. They’re going to be the first things people see when they see me. And, let’s be honest, they’re going to make some people nervous.

With Employable Me I had to lay it all out on the table, and people were okay with it. I was okay with it. No one told me I couldn’t do something, they just told me not to make life harder for myself. They gave me permission I didn’t know I was looking for.

This is one of the reasons I’m glad my episode airs on 4 December, the day after the UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities (3 December). This year’s theme is inspiring disabled people to raise awareness and cause change. I feel like my story shows the importance of that and makes people able to do the same, Otherwise I’d keep my struggles to myself still and not give myself the chance to lessen them.

I won’t say that Employable Me saved my life, but it did save me from myself.

Nicola Golding is a writer who features in BBC Two's Employable Me.

Catch up with Nicola’s story on BBC iPlayer.

BBC Two’s Employable Me continues on Monday on BBC Two at 9pm.

John Morton, writer and director of Twenty Twelve and W1A discusses how he came to set his sights on the BBC for the hit series, and how he tried to avoid writing a follow-up to Twenty Twelve.

It’s Autumn 2012. Perhaps not surprisingly Twenty Twelve, a show about the organisation of the London Olympics, has come to an end and I’m cycling across London (on a fold up bike bought from the set) on my way to a meeting to discuss any ideas I might have for taking the show or the characters further.

Of course I haven’t got any ideas. I’d said from the outset that unusually for a television show Twenty Twelve had its own end built into it from the start: once the Olympics had come and gone it was dead. The clue was in the title. ‘Yes but will you at least come and talk about possibilities’ was the gnomic and in retrospect very W1A response. Of course I was too weak to say no.

Looking back now I realise that if anything is going to clear the mind and liberate the creative juices in unexpected ways, an hour’s pedalling through central London traffic on a child sized bike isn’t it. But at the time I didn’t know that and I arrive at the appointed Italian restaurant with nothing .

Over fizzy water and some sort of pesto affair Jon Plowman (Twenty Twelve Exec Producer) and Mark Freeman (the BBC’s then Head of something) do their best to prod me gently in various benign ways. Was there somehow a way of transplanting the characters lock stock and barrel to a new situation somewhere else? That’s an easy one. No, there wasn’t. Could they believably be recruited one by one to help with next Olympics in Rio perhaps? Again I was ahead of them. No they couldn’t.

This was going better than I thought. I seemed to have got involved in a sort of anti-pitch process and was beginning to be think that if I stuck to my principles for once I was probably capable of making it out of the building without any kind of commission at all. And the thing is I nearly made it, but then over coffee I made a really basic mistake.

At some point during the life of Twenty Twelve I remember saying, again under intense questioning, that the only kind of future life for the show might be to take Hugh Bonnevilles’s character Ian Fletcher, drop him somewhere else, and start all over again with all the other characters. I’d briefly thought about the BBC as a possible place to drop him and for some reason I reminded them of this now.

I thought it was safe to mention it. With the BBC having just gone through a really tough time, this was surely an even worse idea now than it had been at the time. But it was already was too late. I should never have had the pudding. They’d played the long game and they’d won.

By the time I’d managed to unfold the bike on the pavement outside the restaurant the course of the next four years of my life were set. But really I shouldn’t complain.

When I was first trying to get started as a writer I had a Post It note stuck to my computer screen: Nothing worthwhile is easy. I can’t remember who said it now, but it’s helped me ever since. Back then when rejections came - regularly, often, in fact always for a few years - it was a reminder that no one said this was going to be easy, that most people who are trying to get going probably end up folding at some point, and that not folding was about the only part of the process that was within my control.

These days it’s even more applicable. Confronted with the prospect of writing a third and probably final series of W1A at the start of last year my first thoughts are all to do with the familiar weight of responsibility I feel to the actors, the viewers, the BBC, to the characters themselves who don’t even exist for Christ’s sake. In the attempt to make these six new half hours a bit the same, at the same time different, and crucially better than everything that’s gone before, the daily battle with the writer’s (for me) natural feelings of inadequacy are in some ways even harder to win than they ever were. To remind yourself that it’s never been easy, it’s not supposed to be easy, and that if you were finding it easy the chances are it wouldn’t be any good is an essential part of the process.

Is it all worthwhile? It’s not for the writer to judge ultimately and in the case of W1A it’s too late now anyway, it’s out there.

As Siobhan Sharpe herself would say and in fact has said in the past - "We are where we are with this guys. And that’s never a good place to be."

Judge for yourself whether it was all worthwhile or not as W1A series 3 begins at 10pm on Monday 18 September on BBC Two.

Some might assume that the 80s was all shiny pop. How do you see it musically?

I thought 2 Tone was angry and really articulating how the working class had been left behind. Culture Club now is seen as this cosy pop band, but at the time to see a boy dressed like a girl was shocking. I remember my Dad being incredibly upset by Culture Club when he first saw them on TV, and also by Annie Lennox. Those looks were very radical at the time.

Now it looks slightly meaningless because we’re used to seeing that, but at the time it was very very radical. Imagine being worried about being gay at the age of 14, and then seeing Boy George on Top of the Pops. It must have been an amazing moment.

There hadn’t been anything like that since Marc Bolan or Bowie.

Is there a need to re-contextualise the period so we understand its original impact better?

Yes, I think so. Pop culture is always pushing at the edges. After a while everyone gets used to that and then that culture becomes mainstream. The celebrations of Bowie’s life when he died compared the anger, fury and fear in the 70s when he was doing some of the stuff he was doing – people get used to it and it helps make things normal. That is the point of popular culture. It’s kids pushing at the envelope.

Decades are always convenient ways of marking periods out, of seeing a new generation come through. I think the 80s began in 1979 with this burst of post-punk indie pop music and ended in 1989 when rave music entered the charts and became mainstream.

What was the essence of the 80s for you?

There were two things going on at once. There was a shiny kind of pop music and a thriving club culture, but it was also an era when people were suffering a lot – there was a lot of struggle for a lot of people. You can look at the 80s and think it was Duran Duran swanning around the world in colourful baggy shirts. For a lot of people it was a grey decade when they were excluded from things.

Is there a period of music that really excites you?

Every period – whichever period I find myself in.

It’s always the moment you’re in that is exciting. I’ve been really lucky in that I’ve been in the right place at the right time. The music in Birmingham was really exciting. There was loads going on. When I moved to London I was lucky to end up in the middle of the vibrant 80s club scene, warehouse parties, things like that. Again very lucky when Acid House kicked off. Those DJs who went off to Ibiza and came back to open acid house clubs happened to be friends of mine. Whenever something exciting has happened I’ve always been lucky enough to be around. And now I have a 20 year old son who is equally excited about music – he brings things home too.

What do think you’ve got from that obsession?

A sense of belonging I think – I’m in amongst people I relate to. That’s different now when I go to gigs because the crowd is often a whole lot younger than me. Certainly growing up and in my 30s this was all going on around me and I felt a part of it. And Jazzie B and Soul II Soul and the whole thing they set up at the Africa Centre was one of those places. Here was something really exciting made by people who were playing music they loved without compromising. It was an exciting thing to watch and be part of. 

Is there a potential for music to still bring people together given that we consume that music on-demand?

Yes. It just happens in a different way. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to the time when NME was the bible of music you got as soon as you could on a Thursday morning in Birmingham; you scoured the singles reviews then on Saturday you took a long bus ride to the only independent record shop, where you asked them to play three singles to decide which you wanted to buy. That’s never coming back. But my son’s generation are all about the live performance. Look at events such as Radio 1’s Big Weekend or Glastonbury – you see hundreds of thousands of people coming together sharing a love of music. It’s moved to concerts and live events rather than owning the tunes.

Does that shift the emphasis back onto musicians and musicianship?

Absolutely. This is a difficult time for record companies, but I don’t think it’s a difficult time for musicians. It’s a great time for musicians. No matter how niche your music is because of the internet you’re going to find a couple of thousand people across the world who will like your music.

What was the draw for you to get involved in this documentary?

I’ve done quite a few shows with Matt [the director] over the years. He is lovely to work with. When he asks me to do things I do them if I can. He really cares about the people he’s working with and trying to represent. He cares about trying to get that right within all the limitations of a short clip programme.

Tell us your thoughts about the documentary

I’m really glad that what Soul II Soul achieved is being celebrated. I think they were incredibly important as a group, as businessmen and as musicians. They were a black-run business doing things on their own terms in a way that was incredibly inclusive. Anyone could come to their events. Everyone was welcome.

I think that’s what has always been extraordinary about British youth culture. At its best it embraces everyone and Soul II Soul were just a shining example of that.

For people, especially in America, it was the first time they’d realised there was a big black community in Britain and that they could have a sound of their own that wasn’t necessarily derived from American traditions.

I think it was the start of British dance music seeming very confident that it had its own sound which has led to all the music we have now.

Sheryl Garratt is a freelance writer covering all aspects of popular culture.

• Jazzie B's 1980s: From Dole to Soul will be shown on BBC Two on Saturday 26 November at 10.30pm and available to watch on BBCiPlayer for 30 days after broadcast.
• Find out more about music of the 50s 60s and 70s on the My Generation website.

The Prix Italia award ceremony was held in Lampedusa, Italy at the weekend and BBC Two’s Exodus: Our Journey To Europe was awarded two special prizes:   for Best TV Documentary and the Special Prize of the President of the Italian Republic.

The documentary, which is directed by James Bluemel and Produced by Keo Films for BBC Two is billed as a “terrifying, intimate, epic portrait of the migration crisis.” You can see a clip from the programme below:

The jury said:

 “The migrant crisis is rarely out of headlines, but in the method, the ambition and the scale of the approach taken by the makers of Exodus, the Jury felt it had for the first time arrived at a true understanding of what is happening today. By giving their contributors cameras, by allowing them tell us their own story the film gives dignity and a humanity to the migrants. We got to make the journey alongside Ahmad, Hassan, Isra’a and her family – we felt sad alongside them, laughed alongside them; and got angry alongside them.  This film is essential now and for the future, and gives hope to the world too”.

Rudolf Nureyev – Dance to Freedom (IWC Media for BBC Two), also received a special mention at the event for winning “the Jury's respect and attention.”

To see a full list of winners and find out more visit the Prix Italia website.

From tomorrow (Saturday 16 May) BBC Two is hosting a week of BBC Films.  This year BBC Films celebrates 25 years, and Christine Langham (Director BBC Films) spoke to Kate Muir at the Radio Times in an article titled “The Hit Factory” about the season, she said:

“It’s a huge vote of confidence if you’ve got our backing for a film in development… things that might not get made, get made, because we develop the story and help films gain credibility. 

“If there is any profit coming from our investments it goes into funding development and future film projects. But we are very beady about spending money. If we were just interested in profits, if we existed independently outside the public-service remit of the BBC we could not take the risks we do with new talent and tough subjects.”

The TV premieres of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa and Great Expectations bookend the week's programme. Here’s the full list:

• Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa , BBC Two, 9.15pm, Saturday 16 May
• In The Loop, BBC Two,  11.45pm, Saturday 16 May
• Made in Dagenham,  BBC Two,  10.00pm, Sunday 17 May
• Hideous Kinky,  BBC Two,  11.45pm, Sunday 17 May
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,  BBC Two,  11.15pm, Monday 18 May
• Starter for Ten,  BBC Two,  11.15pm, Tuesday  19 May
• The Other Boleyn Girl,  BBC Four, 9pm    Tuesday 19 May
• Mrs Henderson Presents,  BBC Two,  11.20pm, Wednesday 20 May                          
• Death Defying Acts, BBC Two,  11.20pm, Thursday 21 May
• The History Boys, BBC Two, 12.05am, Friday 22 May
• Great Expectations, BBC Two, 9pm, Saturday 23 May  

And if that's whet your appetite you can find out which BBC Films are coming to cinemas soon and are showing  in cinemas now.

Hannah Khalil is Digital Content Producer, About the BBC Website and Blog.

• Watch films from the season after they have been broadcast on BBC iPlayer. 
• Read Commissioning Executive Joe Oppenheimer's blog: BBC Films at 25
• See also Remember these 25 BBC Films?

Today, Broadcast magazine published an interview with Controller of BBC Two and BBC Four, Kim Shillinglaw. The former commissioning editor for science and natural history at the BBC replaced Janice Hadlow in April 2014 In the interview journalist Jake Kanter talked to her about "inheriting a channel in rude health" and the future of BBC Two, which celebrated it's 50th birthday last April.

The full interview is available on the Broadcast website. We've included some excerpts below.

1. On being BBC Two Controller

“'Running any channel is exciting, but running the channel you love, care about and actually watch feels like the icing on the cake,' she adds. If that’s the icing, then Shillinglaw’s belief that BBC2 is in “fine fettle” must be the cherry on top.

The channel will almost certainly post a year of audience growth across all hours in 2014 – some achievement in a year in which Channel 4 and ITV haemorrhaged viewers. This also comes just one year after original daytime content was stripped from BBC Two’s schedule under Delivering Quality First."

2. Looking to BBC Two's future

“'Much about BBC Two just rocks on,' Shillinglaw says. She believes she has a 'great platform to try some new things and find the next turn of the wheel'. Her fingerprints will begin to appear on the channel from early this year, she believes, with some 'new things we’re excited about trying'."

3. On the BBC Two audience 

"High on her list of priorities is breathing fresh life into BBC Two’s comedy output, which comedy controller Shane Allen believes has become “homogeneous” in recent years. Shillinglaw explains: 'We’re trying to reinvent that sense of surprise around BBC Two scripted comedy.'

This is the nub of Shillinglaw’s vision for BBC Two. 'BBC Two is a fundamentally grown-up channel, but it should be young at heart,' she says. 'If you are 60, you grew up with punk. It’s easy to forget that people who are biologically not in their first flush of youth are very young at heart today. We have to make sure that BBC Two doesn’t waste its audience’s time.'"

• Read the full interview 'Kim Shillinglaw, BBC' on Broadcast website.
• New commissions for BBC Two were announced today. More information on the Media Centre website.

The series isn’t just saying "let's look at 50 years of history or look at the 17th century" – it’s my belief we could have made a fantastic series alone looking at Suleiman the Magnificent (or Suleiman the Law Giver), for example. Instead, we’re focusing our series on who these people are and why their story is told in the way it is. What can we learn from the empire they created and the state that followed it? And what does it tell us about the world we live in today?

The easy thing to do would have been to make a documentary series about how great the Ottomans were, or a film about how blood thirsty they were. It’s actually a lot harder trying to navigate that middle ground and say "well, hang on, in their own time they were considered ‘great’ - by our time they were terrible, but compare them to the other empires around and if you were in a minority that's the one it may be more preferable to be in."

Rageh and I had a vision: we wanted to tread that middle ground. The whole point of this series is that we cannot carry on not knowing enough about this empire. Making this series has only come about because of a lot of previous projects I’ve been involved in, from the first ever documentary on the Hajj, the first film about the Sunni-Shia split, the first on the Koran, and the first series on the life of Muhammad at the BBC two years ago. 

Those different projects have given me a level of programme making experience, helping me understand what can be done and what the pitfalls are. What I know now compared to 1992, when I first attempted to make this idea, is that a straightforward history would not have worked - the contextualisation is very important.

Of course, one of the biggest challenges in making this documentary series has been what do we tell and not tell? This is not a kitchen sink approach to the Ottoman history. It can’t be. And of course, since we've finished it - and we will have had another look at it before transmission – President Morsi is no longer in power in Egypt. We also have to bear in mind the situation in Syria and how that is referred to in the series. In making this programme, the conversation is on-going in terms of what should we do and what shouldn't we do?

Additionally, there were considerable debates about how to cover a subject like the Crimean War for instance. If this was a 10 part series, then there's probably a whole episode on the Crimean War. However, it's a three part series, so there is time only to reference it – by describing how the British and French moved from an anti-Ottoman stance to one of support.

Stylistically too, we made a deliberate decision to make use of a lot of contributors. We have some of the best people in the series, all articulating often complex histories about the period. As a programme maker I'd rather hear from them - you get a fantastic range of opinions – rather than one voice reading a scripted narrative.

Multiple contributors also open out the knowledge too and can result in some unexpectedly interesting points being made in the programme. I met Mary Beard's husband at a lunch for example where he explained he's an expert on Byzantium. I explained we were making this series and promised to get the producers to get in touch with him, which then led on to one of the really interesting insights in the programme: A cannon builder of the biggest in the world at the time, offered his cannons to the Byzantines - they couldn't afford it, but the Ottomans could, and the rest is history.

Producers and researchers can look in as many books as possible and not have that kind of knowledge as quickly to hand as say interviewing an expert. So that's why, on stories like this, it’s better to have more experts on a subject which the majority of our audience will have little knowledge about, than it is to have the presenter wandering around just telling people.

I think there will be communities of viewers as opposed to one archetypal 'viewer' of this documentary. I think if you're a viewer who likes history programming, you'll really enjoy this. If you're a viewer who's interested in the Middle East, you're going to find this fascinating. And there will be, I am sure, viewers who disagree with it. That's the key to tackling a subject like this. There are many ways to tell it, and many ways to take it. 

What I would hope is that a lot of people will come away from this saying 'that was really interesting: I didn't know that' and maybe have a different perspective on what they see around them.

Aaqil Ahmed is Commissioning Editor for Religion and Head of Religion and Ethics at the BBC.

• The Ottomans: Europe's Muslim Emperor begins on BBC Two on Sunday 6 October at 9pm.

I’m at the Edinburgh TV Festival today and have just finished my ‘Meet the Controller’ session with Cathy Newman from Channel 4 News. It’s been a chance to look back at what has been a fantastic year for BBC Two as well as look ahead to another exciting year to come. (You can read a summary of some of the points discussed here.) 

It has been a year of real highs for the network, winning Broadcast Channel of the Year and MGEITF (Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival) Channel of the Year. BBC TWO also won more BAFTAs than any other channel this year including awards for: 7/7, Murder, Twenty Twelve and Great British Bake Off plus eight RTS Programme Awards. Drama has continued its resurgence, from the acclaimed series Line of Duty, which was the biggest new drama series on the channel since 2005 (peak of 4.2m) to The Fall (4.7m watched the final episode).

In factual, one of my guiding principles has been to make the intelligent popular, and the popular intelligent. I believe the success of programmes like Great British Bake Off, Great British Sewing Bee, The Last Days of Anne Boleyn and The Secret Life of The Cat is down to the fact that they are content rich and informative, but also compelling and they ‘feel’ distinctively BBC Two.

‘Talent’ has continued to be central and I’ve been delighted to see the success of new expert presenters such as Joann Fletcher and Michael Scott as well as the on-going popularity of established faces such as Mary Beard, Lucy Worsley, Mary and Paul, Dara O Briain and Brian Cox.

Of course, the DQF (Delivering Quality First) cuts have been challenging, but BBC Two is still ahead of its main competitors in peak, and audience appreciation is as high as ever.

On top of all this, I’ve relished the challenge of taking on responsibility for BBC Four, following the departure of Richard Klein in May. I was Controller of BBC Four for four years, and the channel has always held a really special place in my heart.

My ambition is to find ways to increase collaboration between the channels whilst ensuring that BBC Four retains the unique and distinctive voice that I know its viewers love. Today I announced two examples of this new collaborative approach: a major season looking at the art and music of the 18th century and an exciting science moment taking us closer to the Earth’s atmosphere, as well as a number of other new commissions which demonstrate the confidence and range of both channels.

Over on the BBC Media Centre website, you can find out more about the announcements I made including a landmark factual drama about the countdown to the First World War; a major new season about the 18th century across both channels and new series fronted by Ian Hislop, Lucy Worsley, Kate Humble and Fern Britton. 

Janice Hadlow is Controller BBC Two and Interim Controller, BBC Four.

A summary of tweets posted during Janice's 'Meet the Controller' session can be found on Storify. 

For more information about the BBC's TV announcements follow @BBCPress on Twitter or find full details about Janice's announcements on the BBC Media Centre website.

The BBC Academy will be running free 'EdTalks' sessions throughout the day. More information about those industry sessions can be found on the Academy website.

Danny Cohen introduced the Edinburgh International TV Festival coverage on the About the BBC Blog earlier today.