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Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: An underwater battlefield

2016-04-27T10:40:31+00:00

I am not especially keen on military history. I mean I am absolutely fascinated by what actually happened in an ancient battle (very nasty indeed, I can assure you), but I hate those histories of ancient Rome that simply lurch from one round of military conquest to the next.

So when we were making the first episode of Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit, I didn’t particularly look forward to the day we were due to visit the site of a great naval battle between the Romans and Carthaginians in 241 BC, a few kilometres off the Sicilian coast. And, to be honest, I’m a lousy actor – if I don’t feel enthusiastic, I am very bad at pretending to be on camera.

Even our unflappable producer showed signs of being worried. She needn't have been. When we got out to sea it was impossible not to get interested.

There is something quite extraordinary about the best-preserved battle site in the ancient world being under water. But that’s more or less the case. Much of the detritus from the wrecked ships (the victims’ armour, the food containers…) sank safely to the sea bed, and it is now being investigated using deep sea probes and cameras.

I was absolutely glued to the screen in the control room of the boat, watching the eerie glimpses of the bottom of the sea, the fishes and the weed mixed in with the lost equipment of those long-dead sailors.

When the archaeologists spot something really special, they have clever devices to lift it to the surface. And our afternoon’s trip was to Palermo, where some of the best finds are kept.

Among the highlights there are the bronze ‘rams’ that were once fixed onto the ships (for ‘ramming’ the enemy) and some bronze helmets. And, as the film captures, by this stage, I had really got into the spirit of it. And in fact I tried a Roman helmet on.

I fully expect to have some emails ticking me off for this. But let me assure you that, wherever we go, we obey the conservation rules of the museum concerned (that’s why sometimes it’s gloves, sometimes it isn’t - theories and rules about all of this differ). And honestly I don’t think that the object in question came to any harm.

I was perhaps a bit carried away though. As I fitted it onto my head, I said on camera just what I was thinking: words to the effect of: “I bet I’m the first to put this on for more than 2,000 years”. That’s certainly how it felt at the time. But in retrospect, I very much doubt it.

My guess is that that particular helmet has been tried on rather a lot since it came out of the water. And I bet that almost every single modern wearer has had that same romantic fantasy as me... naively imagining that the last head inside it was a Roman one!

Professor Mary Beard is a classicist and the presenter of Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit.

Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit starts on Wednesday, 27 April at 9pm on BBC Two.

It will be available to watch in BBC iPlayer for 30 days after broadcast on TV.

Mary will be blogging about every episode - her posts will go up every Wednesday of the series.

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

Busting myths and unearthing secrets: The real people of Pompeii

2016-03-03T10:30:48+00:00

Apart from the volcanic eruption, what do we really know about the ancient town of Pompeii?

In her documentary Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed, Mary Beard finds out what life was like in the bustling town - from what the people enjoyed baking to where they spent their free time…

The ancient ruins of Pompeii are full of surprises. Whether it is the suites of Roman baths in almost working order, the seedy town brothel, or simply the deserted streets - where you can almost imagine that a resident from 2000 years ago might any minute appear round the corner.

I have been visiting Pompeii for over 40 years now, and every time I go I find something I haven’t seen before. But making our documentary, Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed, I got a chance to see – and to share – all kinds of things that surprised even me.

The volcanic eruption that destroyed the town in AD 79 preserved some very unexpected treasures. One of the highlights of the programme was my first visit to the bio-archaeological deposit on the site. That doesn’t immediately sound very exciting, but the “deposit” is something close to an Aladdin’s cave containing all the food-stuffs that were carbonised when the burning volcanic debris fell on the town, and recovered by archaeologists hundreds of years later.

There are literally jars and jars of dates, figs, pomegranates and olives, all straight from the Pompeian kitchens. There are even baskets of eggs and a few very overcooked loaves that were still in the oven when the bakers decided to run for their lives.

It’s hard not to feel a bit moved at the thought that daily life was going on, some of the bakeries still in full swing, when it was all suddenly cut short by the devastating eruption. Even more affecting are the actual remains of many of the human victims.

Very respectfully, and with the help of a medical CT scanner, we were able to examine some of these remains much more closely than had ever been done before. We wanted to find the answers to some big questions about the real people of Pompeii – about how old they were when they perished, for example, or about their state of health, particularly their teeth.

We managed to bust a few myths. It wasn’t just the old and infirm that were the victims, while the young and fit escaped. There were plenty of twenty-somethings among the remains of the people we looked at. And, despite the wholesome diet we had glimpsed in the deposit, there were a good few whose teeth looked like they’d been drinking the ancient equivalent of fizzy drinks (honey and wine, perhaps).

Pompeii is inevitably a world tinged with sadness and death. But we explored the places where people had fun too, from the swimming pools to the saunas, the bars to the brothel (though I’m afraid “fun” isn’t what the working girls had there).

And I got my very first chance to impersonate a Roman launderer. In one large-scale laundry that has only recently been carefully restored, I actually managed to climb into large vats where the launderers used to spend their days trampling the clothes underfoot in the best cleaning and treatment substance that the Romans knew: human urine, collected in industrial quantities in vats at the front door.

That is how you got your toga clean – and it’s a nice reminder that the Romans were not quite as much like us as we sometimes imagine.

Professor Mary Beard is a classicist and the presenter of Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard.

Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard is broadcast on Thursday, 3 March at 9pm on BBC One.

It will be available to watch in BBC iPlayer for 30 days after broadcast on TV.

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

Wolf Hall: Why I was lost in admiration for Anne Boleyn

2015-01-27T14:21:30+00:00

Hilary Mantel’s books, though written in the third person, are very much told from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view. I wanted to find a shooting style which reflected this. In consultation with our director of photography, Gavin Finney, I decided to shoot hand-held. This allows a great freedom of movement to the camera which, in turn, allows the actors equal freedom on the set.

To cement the sense of being with Cromwell, we rarely enter a room ahead of him, rarely meet a character before he does. The fluid camera follows Cromwell as he moves through the various royal palaces and Tudor houses that are the stage for our drama. It sees what he sees, then comes back onto his face to discover his reaction. This natural, contemporary, point-of-view style of shooting makes Wolf Hall stand out from other recent Tudor dramas.

Mark Rylance read Hilary's books twice in preparation for the adaptation

I think it would be possible to read and watch Wolf Hall with little or no prior knowledge of the period. Our primary objective was to bring to the screen Peter Straughan’s wonderful adaptation of Hilary’s novels, which create an entirely internally consistent world, and don’t owe a great deal to other cultural references.

For this reason, it was possible to create Wolf Hall for TV without drawing on earlier Tudor depictions. We commissioned our own research in a variety of relevant fields and tried to be faithful to the naturalistic, very contemporary style of Mantel’s originals.

I think I am, first and foremost, an actor’s director. I’m not especially focused on the technology.

I long ago realised that a director has two main jobs - to get the script right and to cast the right actors. Once you cast them, (and I had a lot of help from casting directors Nina Gold and Robert Sterne), the best bet is to stand back and not get in the way!

My strategy is very much to trust my actors, to try to create an environment where they can do their best work, insulating them where possible from the inevitable pressures of budget, schedule and physical production.

A good eye and arm: Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) is impressed

Mark Rylance is arguably the best actor of his age-group working today. He is a director, a writer and has run a theatre for 10 years. He is not going to react well to the ‘just stand right here and deliver your lines’ school of direction.

Mark is, I think, looking for a collaboration with a director - not a dictator. He is a master of his trade and all a person like myself can do is offer little thoughts here and there, and provide a somewhat detached sounding-board for his own developing ideas. Since this chimes almost completely with my idea of how to direct actors, this may possibly be why we have managed to work quite well together, at least thus far.

Anne Boleyn's sister, Mary (Charity Wakefield), confides in Cromwell

I was very aware of Hilary as a political figure, and as a person of forthright views who didn’t tend to cut or trim to ingratiate herself with wider public opinion. She appeared to be a person who spoke her mind and wasn’t easily cowed by the howls of protest which sometimes resulted.

I believe we need more people like Hilary, ready to stand up for what is right, in this country. I admired her before working with her and I admire her even more now. She had done a great deal of research for Wolf Hall, studying the sources for five years before even putting pen to paper. She has been incredibly generous towards me at every stage of the project. She made her research archive available and quickly responded whenever I had a question about the text or the depicted characters. She has been hugely encouraging throughout and, on seeing the finished programmes, very quick to offer her very public endorsement.

In many ways, it would be a model for me of a perfect working relationship with an author. I doubt I will be so lucky next time.

Wolf Hall has altered my opinion of Tudor figures across the board. But probably most dramatically of Anne Boleyn. I didn’t know that much about her before we started. But during my research I discovered that Anne was not simply an ambitious and scheming knight’s daughter who over-reached herself and paid the price in blood.

On set with Peter Kosminsky and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn

Anne was a very significant political figure in her own right. Like Cromwell, Anne was of the 'heretic' persuasion - desiring that a Bible in the vernacular should be made available in every Church in England, (this came about eventually, though some years after her death); seeking to repatriate powers from Rome and from the Church and invest them once more in England, in the person of the King.

Anne was probably also a proto-feminist. Women, perhaps especially royal women in that era, were little more than merchandise - sold into wedlock for the advancement of the male members of their family. For a woman to be such a player, politically and spiritually, was extremely unusual in the early 16th century. By the end of our film-making, especially as played by Claire Foy, I found myself lost in admiration for Anne and devastated by her unjust killing.

More on Wolf Hall

The Guardian: Wolf Hall: a challenging book should also be challenging TV
Mirror.co.uk: Wolf Hall star Claire Foy reveals she was emotional filming Anne Boleyn death scene

More on Henry VIII

BBC iWonder: How did Henry VIII use sex and power to secure his legacy?
Mail Online: Lucy Worsley: Henry's horrible history: You won't find any left-handers or extras in specs

Peter Kosminsky is the director of Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall continues on Wednesday, 28 January at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

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

You can’t run or hide: Jessica Hynes on her suffragette comedy

2015-01-21T17:32:27+00:00

I wanted Up The Women to feel like a classic sit-com, almost as if it had always been here

In being so uncompromisingly retro filming with a live studio audience, we actually stand out I think. In dealing with the suffrage movement – a subject matter that most people don't associate with comedy I was aware that I had to make it as user friendly and funny as possible.

You can't run and you can't hide when you’re filming with a live audience

For five out of the six episodes we were in the hall, the kitchen or the entrance filming with no time jumps in the story. It’s tough on the cast and a real challenge to write and film but I wanted the audience to love these characters and feel they knew them - this is a great way to achieve that.

Helen (Rebecca Front) insists her dinner party napkins will do more to change the world than Margaret (Jessica Hynes) and her rousing suffragette speech

It would be too easy to hate Helen

By having her mother in the show we begin to understand that Helen (Rebecca Front) is reacting against the permissiveness of Myrtel (Judy Parfitt) who lived through the enlightenment. It mirrors the relationship many daughters have now with their mothers from the 1960s and I thought people would relate to it.

Helen and Margaret come from my day dreams of imagining women in 1910

I wanted to create characters with personal history who complement each other but whose personalities don't overlap. Margaret is a woman who might have been so many things if she had just had the chance. Cristabel Pankhurst got a first in law but couldn't practice because she was a woman. Margaret has read and absorbed every book she can get her hands on but she has not really 'lived' a day. She was a very clever 'every woman' in a way - battling society’s expectations and controls - constantly managing her own expectations. Her belief that in the future women might not suffer as she had drove her to become a suffragette.. And me to write and play her to vindicate her silence in 1910 by giving her a voice in 2015.

People failing and trying seems to sum life up

Writing about that and making it funny, anything that makes us feel happier, more connected and less lonely, is worth doing.

Margaret (Jessica Hynes) is going on hunger strike... after she's finished a small ham finger sandwich

Creating Spaced was completely different

I wanted Spaced to feel like nothing that had even been on TV before - to fill the screen with a recognisable world and truthful idiosyncratic characters that behave in a relatable way. By heightening the colours, being bold with lighting editing and film styles, we were able to make something both entertaining and perversely realistic. Up The Women was polished and jokes improved, as studio sit-coms need to be, until we filmed. Spaced was locked down and scheduled like a film in order to achieve it with the time and money we had, very little was changed when we filmed.

The Edwardians got some things right…

A vibrating chair once prescribed by doctors to women with stress in order to bring about 'hysterical paroxsysms' was written in at one point but we didn’t use it in the end.

Jessica Hynes created, wrote and stars in Up The Women.

Series two of Up The Women is on Wednesday, 21 January at 10pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

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

Great War Diaries: Turning diaries into compelling drama

2014-08-05T12:50:33+00:00

I first got involved in Great War Diaries four years ago, as both director and screenwriter.

Great War Diaries is a three-part factual drama about how ordinary people from all over Europe and the USA lived through the war, based on their personal diaries and letters.

I loved the idea of showing history as a kind of chaos or confusion; the way we all live history every day, without knowing the why, how or even the outcome of events.

It is in the real diaries and letters of ordinary people, those who lived through the Great War, that you can see this so clearly.

There are, of course, a great many diaries to choose from.

But it soon became obvious that those written by leading politicians and generals were of little use.

They were usually written with an eye to the future, for creating or preserving a legacy – where mistakes and doubts are almost never admitted to.

Instead, we chose to stick to the diaries of ordinary people, for example, a Russian girl, an Austrian peasant, an English volunteer munition factory worker.

During our research at the Imperial War Museum, we came across these handwritten pages, with tiny little drawings and some photographs in it.

Gabrielle West while working at Standish Red Cross convalescence hospital, Gloucestershire

At the beginning it feels like a dreamy girl's diary, even though this well-bred girl from the south of England was 22 years old when she decided to volunteer as a worker in a munitions factory.

She had never worked before in her life, and you can feel the impact on her of the actual working and living conditions.

A visit to the factory: ‘Powder in the air makes you splutter & gives you a horrid bitter taste’

But even though she seemed to be on the brink of collapse several times, she kept going, trying to do her bit - working, not in the shell assembly, but first in the kitchen and later as one of the first female police officers in Britain.

Her illustrations and cute little drawings were soon abandoned, but at the very end of this diary there is a small note about her sending the diary to the IWM, written in 1977, by 'GMW'.

Gabrielle was 87 when she donated her journal

So almost 60 years after the Great War, this then elderly women was still "Miss West".

She survived both wars, and never married. I always tried to imagine her life - a very impressive women.

Gabrielle West is played by Naomi Sheldon, whose previous TV credits include The Hour and Doctors

From the beginning, I thought and believed that for a German to make a new series about the Great War could be only done in an honest, multi-perspective way.

This was a truly multi-national project, with every major nation that participated in the war involved.

Everyone had to be enabled to share his or her perspective, even though today we may feel it wrong, or out of place.

And for true authenticity, all of our characters had to speak their own language - which meant a film with seven different languages and an awful lot of subtitles.

To realise this goal was a hard fight with broadcasters and editors all over the world, but in the end, everyone agreed.

So we have now a series with maybe the most different languages spoken ever produced.

In the dialogue we can hear English as well as Italian, French, Austrian, German and Russian.

Shooting with all the actors from different countries was quite a job.

In the morning my director of photography, Jürgen Rehberg and I were filming in a Russian village, while in the afternoon we jumped to an English club, and all the distinction it brings with it.

Jan Peter with director of photography Jürgen Rehberg, on location in Canada

To keep all the different languages and temperaments in my mind was both challenging as well as mesmerising.

On some days I actually forgot which language was to be spoken on set and had to ask an assistant whether we were in Italy or France at that moment.

In the course of this huge project I have become increasingly aware of how important and precious handwritten testimonies of a time long past could can be – and how good it is not only to have journals from the great and the powerful, but from ordinary people.

Everyone can become a witness; I have started writing my diary again.

Jan Peter is the director and screenwriter of Great War Diaries.

Great War Diaries continues on Saturday, 9 August at 6pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programmes times please see the episode guide.

More on Great War Diaries:
Wikipedia: 14 - Diaries of the Great War
The Telegraph: Great War Diaries: A Global Remembrance

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

Art Of China: My journey of discovery

2014-07-30T06:00:10+00:00

As an art historian with a strong interest in all of the different cultures of the world, I have been to some wonderful and fascinating places.

But never anywhere quite as dramatic and surprising as China, where I spent almost three months last year for BBC Four’s Art Of China.

Watch the trail: Nothing quite prepares you for the experience

China's landscapes are spectacular.

As for the painting, the sculpture, the architecture - well I hope anyone who watches Art Of China will agree that it is thrillingly strange, different from anything they've ever seen, and just breathtakingly beautiful in the way it is made.

I'd never been there before, so this was a real journey of discovery for me - and I really hope that comes across in the series that we've made.

The art of China has also been full of surprises for the Chinese themselves, especially in recent years.

So much digging and excavating has taken place, that they have made a huge number of stunning archaeological discoveries, often by chance.

One of the first places I visited was the remote remains of an ancient place called Sanxingdui, in the Sichuan Basin in south western China.

Some builders digging new foundations had uncovered jaw-droppingly bizarre and wonderful three-thousand year old relics: vast human heads made of bronze with ghoulish staring eyes, masks of beaten gold, a great tree made from metal, complete with fruit and birds perched on its branches.

The discovery of treasures of the lost and ancient city Sanxingdui

The civilisation that produced all these wonders had been all but forgotten, but now it's suddenly risen from the dead!

In neighbouring Shaanxi province I visited the most famous example of China's ancient cult of the ancestors, which led them to bury their dead along with their most precious things: the First Emperor, buried with his army of terracotta soldiers.

What most people will be less familiar with are the astounding bronze charioteers also found in his burial site, whose job it was to chauffeur him around the afterlife.

Made from more than 3,000 separate pieces, they're probably the most sophisticated objects ever made from bronze to survive from the ancient world.

Designed to be fully functioning, these bronze chariots could roll along the ground

I'll never forget reaching the great deserts of the Silk Road afterwards, like walking on the surface of the moon.

Here I visited the great Buddhist cave complex at Dunhuang, painted with images of hell and salvation by generations of artists over a thousand years and more.

Later, I travelled south to the Yellow Mountains, where you can stand above the cloud line, amid the peaks, and imagine that you've gone back a thousand years - and that you're actually standing inside the scene of some beautiful Chinese scroll painting.

China's major belief systems, Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, all place nature at their centre

The mountains inspired different generations of Chinese artists in different ways.

To many painters of the Song Dynasty they symbolised the mighty order of nature, but also the necessary pecking order of human society, with the Emperor as the tallest peak, surrounded by the lesser peaks of his courtiers and the foothills standing for the common man.

To the much later painters of the Yuan Dynasty, who were part of a Chinese elite marginalised and exiled by their new Mongol leaders, the mountains were a place of retreat and defeat.

Their scroll paintings of nature, although exquisite, are also infused with a sense of melancholy.

Finally I looked at Communism, mostly by travelling the urban landscape of Beijing, since it was the city on which Mao Zedong most tried to leave his stamp.

Tiananmen Square, which ironically means “Gate of Heavenly Peace Square” was his creation, for example.

When Communism was first on the rise in China it was viewed by many people with great hope – hope that their nation would finally be modernised, and at last catch up with developments in the west.

For me, the most moving work of art to survive from those years is a scroll painting by Xu Beihong, who was one of the leading artists of the time and also a friend of Mao.

A beautiful depiction of a galloping horse, meant I suspect to symbolise China itself heading towards a bright future.

Galloping Horse is an enduringly famous image, still reproduced throughout China today

The future did not turn out to be quite as bright as Xu Beihong hoped, but still his picture is a deeply touching and poignant document of its time.

I started doing the Art Of... more than 10 years ago now. There have been six series so far (and counting).

If there's a single driving purpose behind the project as a whole, it's been to broaden the horizons of art as usually seen on the telly - to go beyond the usual suspects, if you like, to look past the art of the Italian Renaissance and French Impressionism.

Where next? Suggestions gratefully received...

Andrew Graham-Dixon presents of Art Of China.
Art Of China is on Wednesday, 30 July at 9pm on BBC Four and BBC Four HD. For further programmes times please see the episode guide.

More on Art Of China
BBC Four: Art Of China: Andrew's Best Bits

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

Jamaica Inn: Seeing sense in Aunt Patience's madness

2014-04-17T13:53:25+00:00

Joanne Whalley plays Aunt Patience who is living with her husband Joss Merlyn (Sean Harris), the landlord of Jamaica Inn, when she is visited by her niece Mary Yellan (Jessica Brown Findlay). She spoke to the BBC TV blog about BBC One’s adaption of Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling gothic novel.

Mary Yellan (Jessica Brown Findlay) arrives looking for her Aunt Patience (Joanne Whalley)

What were your first impressions of the adaptation?
When I read the scripts I got really excited because I thought Emma Frost had brought a really modern take on Jamaica Inn without changing anything.

I read the book years ago and I’ve always had a lovely edition of it on a book tower by my bed. She illuminated it in a contemporary way that I latched on to.

Can you tell us a bit about your character Aunt Patience?
It’s a great love story but she is very damaged by it and she has this unconditional blind love that motivates her.

She has put her lot in with Joss and is going to see it through all the way. I loved her commitment and I found her moving.

I love how she changes and I love that sometimes she’s terrible. But then I understand why she’s awful sometimes.

You would go a bit crazy stuck out there by yourself with a gang of wreckers.

'A lonely spot like this, we could be murdered in our beds'

I’m sure she imagined a different life for herself at one point and you see what time and this love has done to her.

How was she different from the character in the novel?
I don’t think anything changed. My memory of the novel was that Patience was crazy and I guess you would call her abused, mad, but really there is a sense in her madness in how Emma wrote the script working from the book.

She brought out the understanding that we all have now: abuse can be a cycle that you can’t break easily.

That’s why women find it difficult to leave abusive husbands sometimes.

It’s never that simple when huge emotional dependency is involved, or what we call love.

I was able to identify with Patience, who was made accessible in a modern way without sacrificing the period, because of how she was given that dimension in the writing.

'Don't you give me judgement for something you don't understand' - Aunt Patience

What was it like working with the director?
Anyone who reads a book can see things completely differently and have a different take on a character according to their own life experience and their world view at that given moment.

It’s always interesting to hear people’s perceptions of the same material.

I really liked what Philippa Lowthorpe was saying about the story and the character and how she talked about it visually.

How did the location influence filming?
Julian Court, the director of photography, did a spectacular job with the tones and the textures and the bleakness.

It is like another character: you feel the setting and the environment.

We react to our environments, unconsciously and consciously, and we are affected by our surroundings.

It affects your mood and your perception of your life and relationships.

You feel the mood that enhances and pushes them all deeper into the impossible situation they are in.

Joanne Whalley plays Aunt Patience in Jamaica Inn.

Jamaica Inn starts on Monday, 21 April at 9pm BBC One and BBC One HD. The series continues at the same time on Tuesday, 22 April and Wednesday, 23 April. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

More On Jamaica Inn
BBC: Jamaica Inn: Meet the characters
BBC Media Centre: Read interviews with Jessica Brown Findlay, Matthew McNulty, Emma Frost and Phillippa Lowthorpe
Radio Times: Radio Times discovers the real Jamaica Inn
The Telegraph: Jessica Brown Findlay interview

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

The Crimson Field: Recreating a WW1 army hospital

2014-04-11T14:52:09+00:00

As the production designer my job on The Crimson Field was to design the set: choosing the ideal location, deciding on the layout, designing all the different areas and selecting the style and decoration.

I researched historical photographs and paintings found from the Imperial War Museum archives, which was important early on as they communicated the atmosphere and look of the production.

I presented my design ideas to the producers in the form of mood boards, drawings, scale models and plans.

My whole team then worked closely together to achieve the ambition of the production.

Early base camp layout plans: the pharmacy set across the square from the quartermaster's store

Once the plans were finalised, I drew a 3D sketch of the whole site to bring it to life

My pharmacy design sketch detailing how the interior of the pharmacy would look

The construction of the pharmacy took three weeks, including painting the buildings

The dressing plan detailed the location of the large furniture in the pharmacy

Ready for filming: it took a week to fully stock the pharmacy with medical props

Marianne Oldham as Rosalie Berwick in the pharmacy

During my research, I noticed from photos of military hospital at Étaples that all the tents had been adapted to make them practical for hospital use.

Entrances and exits had been cut into the canvas wherever necessary, with a variety of wooden doors, storage areas and practical shelving added in.

So I joined three tents together to make a large L-shaped ward tent and imagined that the connecting corridors were storage areas and nurses stations.

I planned the nurses' station to be connected to Ward 1 through a series of corridors

My colour illustrations helped visualise the interior look and feel before construction

Oona Chaplin as Kitty Trevelyan on set in the ward

This scaled drawing showed what the quartermasters store would look like from all sides

An old photograph inspired this rock feature and all of the stone was appropriated nearby

The quartermasters store set dressed with props and ready for filming

Captain Miles Hesketh-Thorne (Alex Wyndham) visits the quartermaster (Jeremy Swift)

Cristina Casali is the production designer for The Crimson Field.

The Crimson Field continues on Sunday, 13 April at 9pm on BBC One and BBC One HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

More on The Crimson Field
BBC One: The Crimson Field: Watch a set tour narrated by Cristina Casali
BBC Media Centre: The Crimson Field
World War One At The BBC: More television and radio programmes
BBC Writersroom: The Crimson Field: Interview with creator & writer Sarah Phelps

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

I Was There: The Great War Interviews

2014-03-14T10:19:09+00:00

More than two years ago, I learned that the Imperial War Museum still had the original interview rushes of The Great War series from 1964, which the BBC had produced in partnership with IWM.

I was intrigued. Having worked on a few similar history series myself – such as Laurence Rees’s The Nazis or Auschwitz – I knew that only a tiny fraction of the recorded interviews would have made it to air.

Never-before-seen footage: Watch the trail

I reckoned many strong and insightful testimonies must have ended on the cutting room floor because they didn’t fit into the series’ narrative or because they were simply too long.

IWM had digital audio files of the interviews and I went through all 280 recordings (more than 50 hours) looking for testimonies about the human experience of the war.

I didn’t want to make I Was There: The Great War Interviews about the military or political history of the war. I wanted to make a film about individual responses to extreme situations.

Researcher Julia Cave interviewing Great War veteran Victor Packer for the 1964 series

As I went through the recordings, it became clear that the people researcher and director of most of the interviews, Julia Cave, had done an amazing job.

This was the stiff upper lip Britain of fifty years ago but the veterans opened up to Julia about the horror, the tedium, and sometimes also the humour of what it was like being there. They even told Julia what it was like to kill a man!

'Bayonets at the ready' - A soldier reflects on the time he killed an enemy soldier

Since The Great War series concentrated much more on the big picture and grand strategies of the war, the majority of these emotional testimonies were never broadcast.

I grouped the selected interviews thematically, following the timeline of a soldier’s experience, from enlistment to death or survival.

There was to be no presenter and no narration, just music by composer Dominic de Grande and captions to introduce each thematic block.

I wanted the interviews to tell their own story.

Home Front: Some soldiers returning on leave had trouble relating to civilians

The greatest challenge was to find the film material for the pieces of dialogue I had selected.

The Great War series was produced on 35mm film using blown up footage from selected original interviews shot on 16mm film.

As a result, each interview was spread over several reels.

To make things even more challenging, I had to synchronise the picture with the sound from the digital audio files.

This proved a major and often tedious undertaking as picture and sound drifted apart considerably.

I got pretty good at lip reading and it certainly helped that in a previous life I had earned a living as a dubbing writer for German versions of American TV series such as The Lone Ranger and Quincy.

Oral history can be tricky. Just because somebody was there it doesn’t mean their story is true.

We had thorough fact checks done and sure enough, some of the interviews proved just too good to be true.

One interviewee described in vivid detail an Anglo-German football match in no man’s land during the famous Christmas truce of 1914. He turned out to be a fantasist.

Another interviewee, Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka The Otter, gave a different account.

In the 1930s and 40s, he sympathised with the Nazis and joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

I wondered to what extent this could have coloured his recollections of the truce.

Research showed that he written a letter home immediately after the event. The description in his letter matched the account that he gave 50 years later in his interview to the BBC.

'A slight spice of danger' - A look at life in the trenches on quiet days

Executive producer Mike Connolly and I were keen to make the archive feel more current as the interviews as well as all film and most stills archive from the period are black and white.

Artist Jon Wilkinson, who specialises in colourising archive photographs, provided extremely realistic and subtle colourisations that not only add depth to the images but also make the people feel less remote and much closer to us.

My ambition was to help restore the humanity of the Great War generation.

I hope viewers will see that these were recognisably modern people, recorded within touching distance of both the experiences that shaped them and our lives today - not distant figures moving jerkily in newsreels.

Detlef Siebert directed and edited I Was There: The Great War Interviews.

I Was There: The Great War Interviews is on Friday, 14 March at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD.

More on The Great War Interviews
BBC Four Collections: The Great War Interviews: Featuring World War One veterans and civilians
About the BBC: BBC Information and Archives: Restoring Archive for I Was There: The Great War Interviews

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

37 Days: Changing my perspective of WWI

2014-03-07T10:42:41+00:00

I’ve been interested in the First World War since I was a boy, but I’ve always found it so hard to understand how people allowed it to happen.

The process of writing 37 Days gave me a real insight into why we went to war – something I hope the viewer will grasp as well.

So how do you get your head around the few short weeks that changed the world forever?

Well the producer Sue Horth and I compiled a 175-page 'war book', which broke down the 37 days.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo set off a chain of events

I traced every conference, every telephone call, private letter and telegram swirling around Europe.

This helped me understand what my main characters would have known and said. I was also keen not to break any major timelines in the plot.

Writing 37 Days did change my perspective of war. I started thinking Europe had slept-walked into war and all the nations were equally to blame.

But I came to think that it was the German war machine that gave the crucial push.

I think the German high-command didn’t have the will to stop the war as they saw a conflict with Russia as inevitable.

It was important to understand the predicaments of my characters, like German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollwegg.

He had to work out what Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted and formulate a foreign policy from this.

But the kaiser, who was an autocratic monarch, who was constantly changing his mind. He may have been a little bit insane too.

Kaiser Wilhelm II is briefed by German ambassador to Britain Karl Max Lichnowsky

I also think the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey was in something of an impossible situation.

His instincts were peaceful and I guess he could have been more aggressive to Berlin at the start.

He could have said, ‘We will mobilise for war if you encourage Austria to attack Serbia’, and that might have reined in Germany.

But equally it could have encouraged Russia, our ally, to become more aggressive and bellicose. I hope the viewer will see the dilemmas facing these men.

There are three episodes of 37 Days and each one deals with a shorter period of time.

This is because events moved quite slowly for the first four or five weeks after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

A lot of statesmen went on holiday as it was summer. But by the final days in August 1914, the pace of events was incredible.

37 Days is ultimately about politics and power. There are some long conversations in it.

A telegram arrives from Germany and causes a rift in the Cabinet Office

People having arguments about stuff that matters. The director Justin Hardy made this work beautifully.

There's an idea in TV that you can only grab the viewer's attention by cutting rapidly between scenes and having the music hammering away. He didn't believe that.

If you do it right there can be incredible drama and tension in political conversation because it's about the conflict of opinion and the clash of egos. Just look at Borgen or House of Cards.

The episodes were all filmed in Northern Ireland last summer. The cabinet and Foreign Office scenes were filmed on a fantastic estate called Ballywalter Park.

We were so lucky with the weather. It was gorgeous and sunny, with lots of blue sky.

This was important as the summer of 1914 was famous for being sunny. I don’t know what they’d have done if it had rained.

Mark Hayhurst is the writer of 37 Days.

37 Days continues on Friday, 7 March at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

More on the World War One Centenary
BBC: World War One Centenary
BBC iWonder Interactive Guides: Margaret Macmillan: How close did the world come to peace in 1914?
BBC: World War One On Television And Radio

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

Sacred Wonders Of Britain: My first encounter

2014-01-06T17:14:27+00:00

From the very beginning my interest in archaeology was driven by fascination with the strangeness of the past.

As well as wondering at the effort involved in building places like Avebury, West Kennet long barrow and the Ring of Brodgar, I wanted to understand what on earth had motivated all that labour in the first place.

When the Sacred Wonders Of Britain project came along, I felt I would finally have the opportunity to have some speculative conversations with the foremost experts in fields like archaeology and medieval history. And so it was.

Why do some ancient sites draw us back and still resonate with us today?

For the first time we could visit sites like St Nectan’s Glen, Flag Fen, Llyn Cerrig Bach, Canterbury Cathedral and many more besides – and allow ourselves to think about not just how and when these places were built, or by whom – but also the most fascinating factor of all – why?

My own first encounter with sacred sites came during my years as a student of archaeology at Glasgow University in the 1980s.

Field trips took us to sites like Dunadd hillfort in Argyll, ancient capital of the kingdom of Dal Riata; the Neolithic stone circles on the Island of Arran, off Scotland’s west coast; the early Christian site of Iona; as well as venturing into the south of England to see the most famous sites of all at Stonehenge and Avebury.

I was captivated by all those places then and I’ve been captivated ever since.

When it came to choosing which sites we should feature in Sacred Wonders Of Britain, the process was agonising.

The notion of sacred is woven through the landscapes of Britain and Ireland.

Generations of people, down through the millennia, have sought to make sense of the cosmos, and their place within it.

Spend time in any of the circles, chambered tombs or early churches and you can almost sense the passion with which our ancestors went about the business of understanding what was going on around them and in the sky above.

We were at all times sensitive to one absolute truth – that it is quite impossible to put yourself in the mind of a Neolithic farmer, or to understand the thinking of an Iron Age druid.

Their worlds are utterly separate from ours and the profound differences in our circumstances mean we would be ill-advised even to try.

In the 21st Century, where religion is practised at all, it is separate from the activities of every day life.

It seems at least possible that in the ancient world, no such distinction existed.

Similarly, the practice of religion may have functioned as a practical tool – not unlike the use of modern politics, bringing people together to discuss matters of mutual concern.

In any event, we tried to allow for those concerns and others. We selected sites that spread across as long a time period as possible.

For this reason, the rock art of Creswell Crags seemed like a must – given that it was made more than 13,000 years ago.

We needed to consider too the world of the Neolithic, the Iron Age, the impact of things Roman and also the advent of Christianity.

Bath's sacred spring holds surprisingly vindictive requests from ancient Romano-British worshippers

Hopefully the sites and monuments visited during the three episodes will suggest just enough to make a meaningful, if speculative picture.

What we are saying about those places is certainly open to challenge – indeed my greatest hope is that our version of events will simply get people talking and arguing!

I’m often asked to identify my favourite site – and it’s as hard a question as you might imagine.

When pushed however, I have to concede that Orkney knocks me off my feet.

If I had a time machine, I would certainly go back to the Neolithic period on those islands in hope of understanding just what grand idea – what visionary individual, perhaps – inspired a mania for monument building that lasted for a thousand years.

Ness of Brodgar on Orkney is, for me, the most significant archaeological discovery of my lifetime.

Just the sight of the place strikes me dumb and I look forward to every visit and the chance to glimpse just a little bit more.

The Ring of Brodgar is an ancient circle of stones, each quarried from a different part of Orkney

Flag Fen too is a wonder to behold – the realisation that people living nearly three and half thousand years ago were motivated to build, to reshape their landscape to such an extent.

There’s undoubtedly something very strange about looking down a deep dark hole onto a structure that people once walked on in the daylight.

But it is the fact the place was swallowed by rising water levels and the deposition of peat that has preserved it for our viewing today.

Thanks to the careful application of modern techniques of preservation, the timbers of the walkway are still timber, soft to the touch.

Much of it is as it was when those Bronze Age farmers knew it as part of their every day landscape.

Maybe it’s just the way I’m made, but that simple fact puts the hairs up on the back of my neck every time I think about it.

Neil Oliver is an archaeologist and presents Sacred Wonders Of Britain.

Sacred Wonders Of Britain continues on Monday, 6 January at 8.30pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

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

Operation Grand Canyon With Dan Snow: A geologist's record

2014-01-03T10:31:11+00:00

Like Antarctica, the Himalayas and the Moon, the Grand Canyon is one of those places that every geologist dreams they will get the chance to see in the flesh.

The expedition in Operation Grand Canyon With Dan Snow gave me that opportunity in a small wooden boat!

At the mercy of the river: Recreating the 1869 Powell Geographic Expedition down the Colorado River

With little rapids experience, but a hunger for adventure, this seemed a small price to pay to see one of the geological wonders of the world.

The canyon, and the expedition, did not disappoint. You get a whole load of rock and a whole load of time to get your teeth into.

When I say time, I mean geological time. Riding the Grand Canyon is like taking a time machine back through 2 billion years of the Earth’s history.

Most people only get to see this from the rim, or to hike down a small part of it.

We were given the opportunity to take it all in, piece by piece, as the boats floated, bounced and forged their way down the river.

‘Here we go!’ Tom O'Hara coaching Dan Snow and Dougal Jerram down Lava Falls Rapid

During the trip I kept some scribblings of the journey as we went down, a way to keep track of all the chaos that was going on.

August 10th – Set off day - Badger and Soap rapids! Today we test the boats properly and set off for good.

Once we launch there will be no turning back. No contact with the outside world for 18 days... Marvellous...

There is much riding of the waves, frantic rowing and adrenalin, cutting through the ice cold water.

Within a few seconds we are into the middle, and some more seconds we are out of the line of fire.

Now frantic bailing is the order of the day, but we have only taken on a bit a water this time... the boats work! :)

I was in a boat with Dan Snow and Tom O’Hara, our river expert who steered us down the river. With Dan’s rowing history I was going to have to work hard to keep up.

The strangest thing is that as a rower, you enter the rapids backwards. All I could hear was the increasing roar of the water and felt the final drop as we went in then... Bedlam!

Dan, Dougal and Tom take a big hit going down Bedrock Rapid

As the expedition ventured further into this geological wilderness, armed with my notebook and camera, I snapped and scribbled like I was measuring up the canyon for a new suit.

“He is off on one of his rock rants again!”

“Stop taking pictures of rocks and get rowing!” Constant jibes that I had to fend off while I explained the sheer geological wonders we were passing.

August 12th - What a sight, Nankoweap, this is the most amazing 360-degree view of the canyon I could imagine.

It takes your breath away with the setting sun casting shadows and a red glow to some of the canyon walls.

The journey was going to be a long one, over some 270 miles, and it was likely to be a war of attrition.

The most amazing thing was how different the parts of the canyon were, and also how different each of the rapids seemed.

August 16th - Fred Thevenin makes a good call and we set of early to hike up a granite canyon (Monument Creek), while the crew rig the shoot for Granite Rapid... Again at Hermit Rapid we plan for a hike up the side canyon (Hermit Creek).

We follow an old miners trail (made by Louis Boucher, an old prospector and canyon guide) up through the schists (metamorphic rocks) and make The Great Unconformity.

A fantastic peneplain surface with ~1 billion years of time missing.

The great unconformity is a surface of ancient deformed metamorphic rocks, buried under giant mountain ranges, that have eroded to the surface and are now in direct contact with sedimentary beach deposits from much younger seas.

A massive time gap in the Earth’s history, which you can literally touch with your own hands.

A hiking trail leads up from the Colorado River to this dramatic view near Nankoweap Rapid

It was these side diversions from the river, the opportunities to explore, and the chance to get away from it all that really gave me my geology fix!

It was great for me to follow in the footsteps of some of the pioneering geologists of the American continent (John Wesley Powell who lead the original expedition in 1869 went on to be director of the US Geological Survey).

Becoming one of very few men on the planet to have survived the Grand Canyon in a boat you would normally be rowing across a lake with a picnic in the country side, for me is also a major achievement and I have the oars in my garage to prove it!

Dougal Jerram is a geologist and one of the presenters in Operation Grand Canyon With Dan Snow.

Operation Grand Canyon With Dan Snow is on Sunday, 5 January at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

More on Operation Grand Canyon With Dan Snow
BBC: Read articles by members of the production team

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

The Ladybird Books Story: How Britain Got The Reading Bug

2013-12-18T16:10:43+00:00

A television producer and director, Merryn Threadgould, had rung me out of the blue, asking for suggestions on how she should get started with researching the history of Ladybird books for The Ladybird Books Story: How Britain Got The Reading Bug.

I had been recently featured in a national newspaper as having a large collection of Ladybird books and I suppose this was how Merryn had got my name.

As a collector and a teacher, there’s nothing more likely to make me wax lyrical than inviting me to expound on my specialism.

What was particular welcome in this case was that it was, apparently, for a full-length documentary dedicated to the history of Ladybird.

Go straight back in time: As much a part of childhood as lace up shoes and warm school milk

So I gave her my suggestions, including the wonderful 94-year-old artist and illustrator Martin Aitchison, Jenny Pearce – daughter of Ladybird’s influential editorial director Douglas Keen, and thought-provoking artist John Bentley.

In addition I offered to give her a potted - or Ladybird - version of the history of this amazing company, which, to my mind, so effectively traces the social history of the second half of the 20th century:

“Once upon a time, in a little town in Leicestershire...”

A few weeks later, Merryn was back, this time in person and at my little house, flanked by delightful cameraman Adam Clarke and researcher Clare Wales, and armed with filming equipment.

By now the energy and enthusiasm of this little trio needed no firing from me.

I was amazed at how the momentum of early research had picked up its own speed and own direction.

Poet Andrew Motion and other Ladybird fans recall the inspiring Adventures From History series

To my trained eye, Merryn had, in lightening quick time, become an official Ladybod – a mini-expert on Ladybird Books.

She had even managed to find the answer to a puzzle that has baffled long-established Ladybods for years – the meaning of a confusing acronym on a well-known Learning To Read series.

The questions she now put to me at interview were sometimes quite challenging but the fresh eyes of this trio made me see my own collection for the first time in years.

Despite my passionate interest in the social history encapsulated in these little books, I was reluctant to reveal the size of my collection to the cameras.

When Merryn suggested filming in my loft, packed to the rafters with thousands and thousands of books and artwork and ephemera, I wasn’t keen.

Selected highlights from my main collection fill the dining room and that I was prepared to display to the world.

But the huge number of items in the loft was an uncomfortable reminder of the craziest days of amassing the collection (mostly from car boot sales and charity shops) – when I had been distracting myself from other problems by hiding in ‘Ladybird Land’.

The first depictions of suburbia: A place that is forever the gloriously ordinary, orderly 1950s

When the team had left, my husband and I realised we needed to take stock.

We began a summer of book moving and reorganising and realised that I’d amassed nearly twice as many books as I thought I had: nearer 12,000 than the 7,000 I’d quoted. This was chastening.

But the sort out also brought to the surface long forgotten gems: for example articles on literacy written by the formidable Vera Southgate or some rare, pre-1940s Ladybird Books I didn’t even know I had.

Fresh avenues to research from my loft ‘archive’ that have actually served to revive my interest after all these years.

Helen Day is a teacher and features in The Ladybird Books Story: How Britain Got The Reading Bug.

The Ladybird Books Story: How Britain Got The Reading Bug is part of Timeshift on BBC Four at 9pm on Sunday, 22 December.

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

Pilgrimage With Simon Reeve: Retracing footsteps

2013-12-03T10:09:46+00:00

Travelling from Holy Island in Northumberland to Jerusalem. What an adventure!

That's what I thought when I got a call from Simon Reeve to join him on his latest travels for Pilgrimage With Simon Reeve.

What drove our ancestors to take on these epic journeys?

No doubt some of our intrepid ancestors would been just as excited by the thought of the adventure as well. Although we've got it easy today compared with them.

Pilgrims of the past had to travel by foot, on horseback or by boat on perilous sea crossings. All the while they had to avoid robbers, disease, hunger and exhaustion.

Health and safety guidelines wouldn't allow us to give Simon a taste of all these things but as a traveller himself he had always wanted to retrace the footsteps of our pilgrim ancestors.

Working with Simon was great fun. He's happy to throw himself into any situation and has that adventurer spirit which is shared by pilgrims of the past and present.

Neither of us are religious and I think when we set off on this journey, across the mud flats to Lindisfarne, we weren't sure what to expect or what we'd find.

Simon Reeve follows a line of posts marking out the Pilgrims' Crossing at low tide

It's raw nature out in the North Sea and we experienced some of the harshest filming conditions on the entire shoot, strong winds being the biggest factor and especially challenging for a sound recordist.

We had hoped to catch a lift with some local fishermen back to the mainland but the conditions made it too dangerous. Mind you looking through a camera while bobbing around isn't much fun.

The stunning beauty of Lindisfarne and that entire stretch of coastline more than makes up for its harsh climate.

No wonder our ancestors chose this spot to be closer to God.

Making a travel documentary means that you're constantly on the move. Just when you're settling in to one place, you're off to the next.

With long car, train and plane journeys the crew gets to know each other pretty well. For me that's one of the best things about being on the road but I draw the line at playing 'I spy'.

My colleague Damian O'Mahony took over directing the next leg of the journey to Rome but I joined up with Simon in Istanbul to film the final leg to Jerusalem.

I would recommend this journey to anyone, religious or not. So much of our own history and culture comes from this part of the world.

A particular highlight for me was meeting a group of Greek Orthodox monks at the Mar Saba monastery in the West Bank.

The Mar Saba monastery is built directly into the side of a mountain deep in the desert

Very few film crews are allowed inside and although we managed to get beyond the front gates we were unable to show you the extraordinary 1500-year-old chapel adorned with hundreds of skulls of monks, martyred in holy wars.

Behind a thick curtain we were shown another dark room packed with bones on which was placed more skulls.

We were then taken to the main chapel where we saw the partially preserved body of St Sabbas, a devout Christian who founded the monastery in the middle of the desert.

Although macabre it was actually very moving and although I would have loved to have shown you these sights, perhaps in hindsight some places are better left as sacred.

And so we finally made it to Jerusalem, but not with the blisters that have accompanied so many pilgrims who made it this far over the centuries.

It's an amazing place to film and a dream for directors. Lots of atmospheric, narrow streets with pilgrims from the major Abrahamic faiths all making their way to their sacred sites.

If like me you're a bit of a people watcher, then Jerusalem is a great place to be.

Our final destination here was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

On arrival priests scurried us into the sepulchre itself, allowing us just a few precious minutes to get the shots we needed while other visitors waited for their turn.

It suddenly dawned on me that I was standing on the spot where Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead.

If the camera is a bit wobbly at this point it's because it's hard not to feel an enormous sense of awe at the significance of this spot. Fortunately Simon held his nerve better than me.

Chris Mitchell produced and directed episode one and episode three of Pilgrimage With Simon Reeve.

Pilgrimage With Simon Reeve is on Tuesday, 3 December at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD, and 11.20pm on BBC Two Scotland. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

More on Pilgrimage With Simon Reeve
BBC: Watch an interview with Simon Reeve
BBC News: The man who carries a 25kg cross everywhere
The Telegraph: Simon Reeve: A pilgrim's progress
The Daily Mail: Simon Reeve reveals how he was moved to tears making a series on ancient pilgrims

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

Blues America: History come to life

2013-11-28T16:04:55+00:00

The birth of the blues, for me, was when I heard an LP called The Best of Muddy Waters when I was 17. I’d never heard music so strange and beautiful.

So the chance to produce and direct Blues America, a two part history of the blues for BBC Four, felt like a gift.

It meant travelling to New York, Chicago and the Mississippi Delta to interview a host of musicians, including James Cotton, who was part of that great Muddy Waters band, and Keith Richards, who drawled “This one I had to do.”

'We just thought more people should hear the blues' - Keith Richards (right) with Mick Gold

Questioning heroes from your adolescence can be daunting. For some obscure reason, I was convinced that Keith would be good.

He was. Charming, smart and funny, he enthusiastically brought to life the music and musicians he loved the most.

Episode one, Woke Up This Morning, looks at that elusive moment when the blues first took shape at the start of the 20th century.

But there were a few headaches. There was no archive footage of many of the major figures, a staple of this sort of documentary.

Some early giants of the blues, such as Charley Patton, are known only by a single photograph. The chance to talk to people who knew these musicians passed away years ago.

How to bring their stories and their music to life? One answer had to be – find musicians today who can embody early blues music, talk about it and play it for us.

We were fortunate to find The Ebony Hillbillies, who are recreating the music you would have heard if you could time travel to a country dance in Mississippi around 1903.

We also filmed Blind Boy Paxton, a young man of 23 who grew up in central Los Angeles.

But when you meet him, it’s like talking to a country boy who’s walked out of some small town in Louisiana around 1936, clutching his guitar.

He talks with a soft Southern drawl, and can play beautiful renditions of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and Robert Johnson.

Me And The Devil Blues: Blind Boy Paxton performs a song closely associated with Robert Johnson

When I interviewed Paxton, he could talk about these early blues men as if he had left them a few minutes earlier. Blind Lemon Jefferson?

“He was a doozy! I don't know about ragged, he wore some of the wildest suits you ever seen.” Finally I asked him about Jimi Hendrix.

“Who?” asked Paxton. I began to explain: Hendrix was an American guitarist who came to London and made some records.

“Never heard of him,” said Blind Boy Paxton flatly.

There was a sly smile hovering around the corner of his mouth, but his ability to stay in character as a pre-war country blues musician was impressive.

One misconception we wanted to clear up is to show the history of the blues is much more than the story of lonesome men playing guitars.

The blues hit America as a pop music craze, and when the blues took off in the 1920s, the early stars were women: Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and, greatest of them all, Bessie Smith.

A few precious minutes of film of Bessie survive. To augment this, assistant producer Tom Woolfenden contacted Miche Braden, who had created a stage show based round Bessie's life.

Miche could belt out Give Me A Pigfoot (And A Bottle Of Beer) while explaining the tribulations of segregated America which Bessie surmounted in her music.

Miche Braden sings and talks about the Harlem high life made memorable by Bessie’s song

Archive producer Jeannie Clark did clever deals to source hitherto unseen footage of Southern life, cotton plantations and Chicago clubs, talking to film collectors late into the night across transatlantic time zones.

Of course in episode two, Bright Lights, Big City, which runs from Chess Records in post-war Chicago to the present day, more archive footage was available and more interviewees gave us their stories to explain how key people shaped the history of blues music.

'Muddy Waters was their first real star' Marshall Chess on the beginnings of Chess Records in 1950

Marshall Chess remembered his dad, Leonard Chess, founder of iconic blues label Chess Records, telling him why he bought a club in a black neighbourhood of Chicago.

"We didn’t have any money and it was the cheapest rent. So he bought a club, it was successful... And this is where he really got his first taste of recorded music. People came in to record one of his jazz artists, and he realised that another way black people were spending money was on records."

In the States, we had four weeks to film every interview and location sequence for two 60 minute films.

Each time we filmed a blues interview, we asked our artists to give us a song.

When we filmed a funky juke joint for episode one, the Blue Front Café in the tiny town of Bentonia in Yazoo County, Mississippi, co-producer and cameraman Sam Bridger went ducking and diving with his camera floating through the dancers as a local band belted out Dust My Broom.

Sam Bridger films Roosevelt Roberts on bass guitar

It was history come to life. In the 1960s, every blues band in the Thames Delta – from The Yardbirds to Fleetwood Mac – cranked out this number made famous by Elmore James.

But it was first recorded by local Mississippi musician Robert Johnson in 1936.

The owner of the Blue Front café, Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, gave us first hand testimony of running a juke joint in the Deep South.

And when asked to explain the outlook of the blues, he gave an eloquent shrug and delivered my favourite definition of this marvellous music.

"Life," he said. "Blues is life."

Mick Gold directed and produced Blues America.

Blues America is on Friday, 29 November at 9pm on BBC Four. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

BBC Four: Collections: Blues: A selection of programmes from the BBC archives featuring influential blues musicians, including B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and more.
BBC News: On the trail of the blues: A BBC Four documentary about Big Bill Broonzy

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