From the BBC archives: "Mrs Dorothy Downs is one of a group of women workers who recently volunteered
to give up their holidays to work very long hours in order to back up the RAF's 1,000 bomber raids over Germany."

Repeating Bomber on Armistice Day of all days is a massive compliment to everyone involved in the programme.

We have also been paid a more subtle accolade. Radio 4 Extra is replicating the original real-time nature of the broadcast. It must have been tempting to chop the thing into more conventional lumps, so I thank them for doing so.

I'm hoping to persuade you to find the time to listen to the programme live. However the reasons to do so are elusive and resist explanation.

Briefly, Bomber tells the story of a bombing raid on Germany by the RAF in 1943. It focuses on the experiences of a handful of bomber crews, the civilians in the town they bomb, and the nightfighter crews sent against them. The bombers take off in the early evening. It will take them three hours to plod to Germany, and three hours to crawl back. Those destined to make it home, or survive on the ground, do so before midnight.

Real time has always fascinated me, even at a mundane level. I was the sort of child who noticed that, in spite of Blofeld's henchman clearly announcing there was only thirty seconds and counting, James Bond always had a good couple of minutes to defuse the nuclear device. Would it, I wondered, be better if he didn't?

Len Deighton's documentary novel spans twenty-four hours. I first read it as a sparks working night shifts at BBC World Service. The backs of my legs aching through tiredness, I learned of fatal lapses of concentration in the early hours. It was, of course, a simple enough light bulb moment: perhaps I could match a listener's physical experience to the remorseless clock of a drama.

Twelve years later (I had meanwhile had a career as a Radio 1 producer) Radio 4 decided to test the real time theory. No-one knew whether this experiment would work or not. I think it did.

Firstly, tension - especially as Len's marvellous characters were impossible not to care about - is rarely allowed to build over nine hours in any medium. That delayed action bomb, fused in the mid-afternoon, only concludes its deadly purpose just before midnight.

Secondly, just carrying on with one's petty schedule (I was unpacking in my new flat), lends a remarkable contrasting insight to the unfolding dramatic incidents. It took an hour to do those three boxes, and an hour for ten Lancaster bombers to be shot down with seven men aboard each one. I have never felt so humblingly safe in my life.

Thirdly, and this was originally me laying the ghost of James Bond to rest, we had time checks that worked in both time frames. To hear the crews synchronise their watches and see the same on the kitchen clock sounds like sleight-of-hand, but it had another extraordinary connecting effect to the drama.

There are many other things about Bomber, not least the performances, the script, the direction, the authenticity for which we strove and the remarkable reminiscences I recorded in peaceful sitting rooms in Britain and Germany, dovetailed into the action.

But the effect of all these will, I promise you, be multiplied if you are able to follow the story in real time. Park the iPlayer for this one. As one listener wrote after the first transmission:

"Thank you for Bomber. It completely ruined my day. I had planned a dinner party, but my guests and I were compelled to sit by the radio right through to midnight."

Bomber is directed by Adrian Bean and produced by Jonathan Ruffle

• Bomber is on Radio 4 Extra on Friday 11 November starting at 2.30pm.
• Radio 4 Extra is available on digital radio, digital television or via the website.

Cutting out petals at the Poppy Factory in 1935

With the death of the last First World War combatant earlier this year, another of the human threads connecting us to that time fell away.

But in a white factory building by the Thames, there is an unbroken link between modern ex-service men and women and the soldiers who came back from the 1914-18 war, wounded and in need of work.

The building is the Poppy Factory, and for nearly ninety years it has provided a safe place to work for people who face challenges in civilian life.

Tony is 57 and left the army after being badly burned on a training exercise.

"I was on the sick for three years. Basically I'd been written off. I do have psychological problems and in the end I just couldn't work because of panic attacks. There's no other way I could get work unless I came through a supported programme.

"I make as many poppies as I can, but in the background there's no stress or anxiety about having to do a certain number."

Preparing Foliage for Wreaths in the early 1920s at The Poppy Factory

The Poppy Factory was the creation of Major George Howson, an engineer with remarkable energy and imagination. His family still talk of the pulley he rigged up across his large garden, and the bridges he built across stream at the bottom.

He had a genius for connections. After the success of the first Poppy Appeal in 1921, when flowers had been imported from France, he could see the need for British poppies. And as founder of the Disabled Society, he knew the plight of wounded soldiers. So he put the two together.

But he wasn't optimistic about his plan to set his men to the delicate, repetitive task of making poppies. "I do not think it can be a great success," he told his parents in 1922.

His workforce of five grew quickly, and within a few years more than three hundred and fifty men were meeting the entire demand for Remembrance poppies, along with a sister factory in Edinburgh. The Poppy Factory moved to Richmond, where it still stands.

Major Howson with colleagues

Though it's a smaller team now - some of the work is done by home-workers and machines at the Poppy Appeal headquarters - millions of poppies, wreaths and crosses are still made in Richmond.

Barry spent thirty years in the Royal Navy. He has a box of chocolate éclairs at his feet, family pictures around his desk, and a shelf of Abba albums and greatest hymn collections. It's repetitive work, clicking together the plastic and paper to make poppy after poppy, but he cherishes the environment.

"I always wanted to visit the Poppy Factory, never thinking I'd ever work here. I was indoors for three years with arthritis. They're lovely people to work with."

Dave Brown demonstrates the cutting machine to visiting Chelsea Pensioners

Bill saw a poster about the factory when he was visiting the organisation Combat Stress in Leatherhead.

"You get a lot of military banter, but if you start to feel uncomfortable for some reason and want to back off, then they let you be quiet. It's a safe environment for ex-service people with certain problems."

The 1920s soldier wouldn't recognise the spacious factory floor and working conditions. But the need for mental space and time to find your own working rhythm hasn't changed. Neither has the importance of jokes. Before coming here, Bill says, he did a horticultural course, but then couldn't find a job.

"I'm still working with flowers though."

Chris Ledgard is the producer of The Poppy Factory

• The Poppy Factory, is on Wednesday 9 November at 11am and you'll also be able to hear it shortly afterwards on the Radio 4 website.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nnp0k

The seeds for Sunday Worship from Helmand were sown more than five years ago. I'd always been interested in the role of religion in an organisation where the job - when all else failed and to put it bluntly - was to blow things up and kill people. It took about 18 months from first contacting the Ministry of Defence until Martin Bell and I stepped on to a flight from Brize Norton to Iraq just before Christmas 2006.

We were heading for Basra to meet the Reverend Andrew Martlew, who was then stationed at the Shaiba Logistics Base with 40 Regiment Royal Artillery and the series for Radio 4 was called 'God and the Gun'. In the jargon of the Church his job is known as incarnational ministry. Getting out of the churches and on to the ground. Sharing the lives of the people who need you. And for a padre in the military, that can mean going in to some very uncomfortable places, both physically and spiritually.

The programme was a success, winning the premier award from the Sandford St Martin Trust, but I felt there was unfinished business. 'God and the Gun' was a documentary and came, I hope, with its own insights. But there was another way of exploring the experience of religion in a battle field. Why not through an act of worship? I thought that would allow us to explore the human side of this story at a much more profound level.

'Sunday Worship' is Radio 4's weekly act of worship. Mostly it comes in a conventional form as you'd imagine, from a church or cathedral, but occasionally it goes 'out on the road' and is recorded as a feature - still recognisably an act of worship with prayers and hymns, but with added documentary elements.

When the causalities started to mount in Operation Panther's Claw everyone I spoke to in the military told me that the atmosphere on Remembrance Sunday this year would be different. In July I suggested recording a Sunday Worship in Helmand on the themes of sacrifice, service and remembrance and that Andrew Martlew, who's still a serving padre, would be the ideal man to do it.

So, after a lot of behind the scenes negotiation with the Ministry of Defence, that's how we found ourselves early one October morning once again at Brize Norton waiting for the RAF flight to Afghanistan. When you're making a programme dealing with such powerful and emotional themes, getting the right tone is the most important and difficult challenge - giving an honest account of what the people serving this summer in Afghanistan have been through, without being voyeuristic and sensationalist, or sentimental and mawkish.

I'd be lying if I said that I had an exact image of the tone I wanted for the programme and I think I'd doubt any producer in similar circumstances who told me they had. I don't believe you can ever have an advance plan; you've just got to rely on your antenna and thankfully, in this case, your presenter. We were interviewing the sergeant major of the hospital in Camp Bastion. He's a member of the Territorial Army and in civilian life worked for BT. In Helmand he found himself, among other things, in charge of the mortuary.

He'd steeled himself for preparing the bodies of soldiers for repatriation; what he didn't expect was to be wrapping in shrouds the bodies of young children - victims of accidents who'd been brought to the hospital, or who'd been caught up in the fighting, and sometimes victims of IEDs - those roadside bombs can't tell the difference between a British soldier and a local child.

As the SM told us, you can't see the sight of small children in large body bags without it changing you and not surprisingly he started to cry. And so did my presenter Andrew Martlew. But then something extraordinary happened. Something which I, coming from a documentary production background, had never encountered. Andrew Martlew the presenter, instinctively and unselfconsciously became Padre Martlew, the army chaplain. He reached out to that soldier knowing, in a way that only another soldier would, what he was going through and offering comfort and reassurance. For chaplains, this is what incarnational ministry is about.

For me this small moment, mirrored countless times in different guises, distilled the essence of remembrance from a soldiers' perspective. This is the window I wanted to open for listeners. I think only Sunday Worship could do that and perhaps only an army padre would understand what tone to take. And there were three people crying in the corner of that ward in Camp Bastion hospital.

Phil Pegum is a Producer in the BBC's Religion & Ethics department

• Sunday Worship is on Radio 4 at 0810 Sunday. Listen again to the Remembrance Day special.
• Both episodes of Phil's God and the Gun, presented by Martin Bell in March 2007, are available on the Religion and Ethics web site.
• Phil also produced last week's Moral Maze about Twitter and mob rule.
• Phil took these photographs while he was at Camp Bastion.