Heather Peace as DS Sam Murray

In series two of Lip Service I was given some real challenges with the writing.

I felt like I had a real sense of who Sam was, which was a blessing as the writing explores how this steady character would react if everything around her became out of control.

It explores how it affects her work and it looks at Sam dealing with the issues alone and not asking for help.

I think the love triangle between Cat, Sam and Frankie only worked in series one because of the writing.

Harriet Braun (series writer and creator) wanted the Sam character to be a real contender in the fight for Cat's affection.

This contributes to the drama as it leaves the audience torn between Sam and Frankie.

When I first auditioned for Lip Service it was for the part of Frankie - they hadn't yet started to look for a Sam.

I read for the part but just wasn't right and I knew it. I couldn't find anything charming or loveable about the character but I think Ruta Gedmintas did.

At the end of my audition for Frankie I said "I could play that Sam character standing on my head!" at which point they made me read for it there and then.

I was thinking "I better get this right now after being so blooming cocky!".

At that time she was only in a couple of scenes and when I came out of the audition I phoned my agent and said "If I stood a chance of getting the lead role in Lip Service, I just talked my way out of it by reading for one of the really minor roles, sorry".

Cat (Laura Fraser) and girlfriend Sam (Heather Peace) in Rubies bar

The hardest part of this second series was the fact that I had a few scenes on my own to film and I tend to be someone who bounces off the energy of the other people in the scenes with me.

I have the concentration span of a hamster so I really had to stay in the zone.

I listened to my iPod between shots so that I didn't start chatting and being silly.

It was a challenge but one that I loved every minute of.

I believe in the show and the writing... so roll on series three (fingers crossed).

Heather Peace plays the role of Detective Sergeant Sam Murray in Lip Service.

Lip Service starts on Friday, 20 April at 9pm on BBC Three. 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.

Alex Langlands meets Gwyn Thomas and his mountain sheep

You might think that as an archaeologist there isn't much call for my services in the food industry, but you'd be wrong.

Archaeologists - especially on TV - have been guilty of portraying archaeology in too narrow a light.

Over the last decade or so it has moved on as a discipline and has become so much more than a few trenches, some broken pottery and a handful of dusty old bones.

Archaeology is all about the material world around us and how to read that world.

Our own lives leave in their wake an archaeology of sorts, and even the most contemporary of industries leaves behind an archaeological record that can be studied in its own right.

The structured landscape of the world around us and the built environment are archaeological resources that can tell us a huge amount about ourselves.

For example I was amazed to discover in Scotland just how big the herring industry had been and how crucial to its growth the railways were.

The smokehouses of Mallaig, the dry stone walls of the Welsh valleys and the ancient field systems of Norfolk (all of which feature in the series) are all archaeological remnants of food-producing industries that have come to define these places and the people that occupy them.

What's more, before the Industrial Revolution the overwhelming majority of people in this country worked in a rural setting where their lives were intimately bound up with the production of one thing - food. So as an archaeologist you're never far from studying that which we have eaten and its centrality to our island's history.

In episode two, I got the opportunity to explore sheep farming in the mountains and valleys of Wales.

It's a way of life that really appeals to me. My host Gwyn was a true inspiration and I can honestly say that after a day striding around the valley I didn't want to leave.

Carving out a living in this harsh environment is all about working with the conditions - not against them - and the idea that sheep can be 'hefted' to the hills fascinates me.

A 'hefted' flock is a flock that knows their patch of the hillside and knows where to be and when. So much so that when the farmer comes to round them up all he needs is a dog and a whistle and the ancient knowledge passed down from generation to generation of sheep kicks in.

The flock slowly make their way, without the encouragement of a quad bike or the constraints of barbed wire, to a convenient place on the mountainside where they can be counted and checked - magic and timeless.

Alex visits Norfolk in episode two to examine the impact of the turnip

You'll see in episode one that I've always struggled to enthuse people about the turnip and just how important it has been to British farming.

So when I was asked to travel to Norfolk and explore the history of this humble vegetable and the role it still plays in agriculture, I was delighted.

This was a chance, once and for all, to spell out just how key it was to arable and livestock farming.

Turnips were introduced into crop rotations in the 18th Century to improve fertility in the soil, break the cycle of pests and disease and to support greater numbers of livestock.

The results of its introduction can hardly be understated and there's little doubt that without this simple root vegetable farming would never have been able to support the huge population growth of the 19th Century.

It was in Norfolk that it was really brought home to me just how important food is.

Its production and consumption permeate almost every aspect of our lives and its story can tell us so very much more than we think about Britain's colourful and extraordinary history.

Alex Langlands is one of the presenters of Our Food.

Our Food begins on Wednesday, 4 April at 8pm on BBC Two and BBC HD (except for analogue viewers in Northern Ireland and Wales). The series will be available to watch in iPlayer until Wednesday, 2 May. For more information about analogue television and the digital switchover please visit Help Receiving TV and Radio.

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.

Dirk Gently (Stephen Mangan) and Richard MacDuff (Darren Boyd)

The novel writer is master of his domain. Apart from odd suggestions from an editor or publisher he is king, supreme leader and dictator.

Making television is essentially collaborative and involves the creative input of a huge number of people, all of whom, to a greater or lesser degree, influence the finished product.

The producers are responsible for hiring everybody. They choose a writer (or writers in our case) to produce scripts. These scripts will set the template for all that follows but there are thousands of creative decisions still to be made.

A director is hired. Who you pick will have a massive impact on the finished product because nearly all decisions from here on in are made in conjunction with him or her.

Actors are chosen. They picked me to play Dirk but imagine the show with, say, Damian Lewis or Harry Enfield or Alexander Armstrong as Dirk instead. (If you believe any of them would have been better than me, please don't tell the BBC.)

Darren Boyd plays Richard but how different would the show be with Rupert Penry-Jones or Russell Tovey as MacDuff?

Dirk and Richard are on a stakeout

Locations for filming are chosen with the help of a locations manager, helping to find the perfect place as described in the script and if you can't find the right place you might build a set, which has to be designed, built, decorated and furnished.

The art director is responsible for the look of the whole show and, with the art department, decides everything from the colour of the walls to the knick-knacks on a shelf.

The costume designer clothes the actors. My look in the series is different from the pilot because we had a different costume designer who brings her own sensibility.

Neither is 'right' but they are both different and have an impact on what the audience feels about Dirk. Imagine David Tennant's Doctor Who in a bomber jacket and DMs.

The cameraman and the director chose the style of shooting. Again you'll notice a difference between the style of the pilot and the style of the series. Which do you prefer?

Look out for the very first sequence in the first episode of the series, up to the title credits, and imagine quite how many decisions had to be made about a myriad of things just to put that together.

Then there's the music, which has an enormous impact of the feel of a show. Hair and make up, lighting, sound and dozens more, hundreds of decisions have been made about hundreds of things that all impact on what you see on your screens.

Unlike books, which require a writer, a laptop and a reader to do all that work in their heads.

Stephen Mangan plays the title role in Dirk Gently.

Dirk Gently starts on Monday, 5 March at 9pm on BBC Four. For further programme times, please visit the episode guide.

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

Lucian Freud

I don't want to pretend to have known Lucian Freud. I only met him three times for breakfast, with his wise and practical assistant David Dawson.

We met to discuss Lucian Freud: Painted Life - the BBC Two documentary I was to make.

My impression was of someone extremely alert, animal-like, relying for information to a great extent on what he saw.

The bliss of looking, to struggle to capture in paint something precious, the presence of a human being, were his activities 24/7, but as the newspapers and conversations indicated, he was interested in anything.

At the meeting he asked me a few questions about the nature of documentary films, which were sharp, tough, and funny.

"Is a documentary" (residue of German accent) "like a sign that says 'Toilet'? Is it not merely educational?"

He tolerated my fumbling answers, but he expected absolute honesty. Apparently, I was told later by a close friend of his, this was a mild reflection of the much more contrary and confrontational younger Freud.

His questions put a finger on essential issues.

The problem of 'documentary' is that it claims some sort of automatic or special truth, through photography's claim to truth, an idea that dominated Lucian during his lifetime.

Where does the truth about something or someone lie? How do you deal with it in a film? Stop pretending your medium has any built-in objectivity?

Why bother, Freud would say. For him, painting was the only medium adequate to the task of searching for truth.

David Hockney on Lucian Freud's painting technique

Making a painting was the most important thing anyone could try to do, if they were to get close to the essence of things, to approach an absolute truth.

At another meeting, the sun was streaming in. By then Lucian knew I liked his regular food supplement: nougat. He cut me a slice without me asking.

At the end of the film, the art critic Sebastian Smee said that in the company of Lucian he did not feel the need to say anything clever, just to be with someone so intense and so alive was enough. I think that is so insightful.

I hardly said a thing - not that it would have been clever if I had.

Lucian started wiggling his fingers around to make interesting shadow patterns. The shadows were green by some accident of light reflecting from the leaves of flowers on the table.

He enjoyed the sight, and so did I.

We started production in the spring of 2011. Lucian said he would still be around for his exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which started this month.

Reflection (self portrait) 1985

But of course he was wrong, in July he died. After his death the whole project changed.

Many of his friends and family now felt free to take a bigger part in the film, and, in their grief, to articulate the feelings and insights that are so much in the foreground of the mind when someone you love dies.

The aim of the film is to look more closely, with an open mind, at the work. The editor, Paul Binns, and I tried to deploy the amazingly candid interviews from old friends and family to reveal themes in the painting.

At the moment I write this the composer and musician John Harle is performing a saxophone part for his intensely moving score.

I am sitting in a square room with red curtains on all sides, and a mass of sound mixing technology.

Thinking about Freud makes me look more closely and with greater fascination at the most ordinary of things - to realise what a strange place the world is, and how barely we understand it.

Randall Wright is the director of Lucian Freud: Painted Life.

Lucian Freud: Painted Life is on BBC Two and BBC HD on Saturday, 18 Feburary at 9pm.

For further programme times, please see the upcoming broadcasts page.

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

Trailer for Inside Men

That's basically where this story began for me. How do I fundamentally change a man's personality? How do I use his weakness as his strength?

How do I get him to do something that just plain isn't in him?

There was some skepticism when I first pitched the idea. Heists had gone out of fashion, both in reality and in drama.

Growing up and watching TV in the late 1970s, every other week some hairy geezer was pulling a pair of nylon tights over his face and walking into a bank with a sawn-off shotgun.

If you wanted to become a millionaire overnight, armed robbery was pretty much your only option. By the time the early 1990s rolled around, credit cards and the national lottery had given criminals an easier option.

It took a couple of meetings to convince everyone that this wasn't going to be about the money. Inside Men isn't just a story about a robbery, it's about what it means to be a modern man.

Chris (Ashley Walters), Marcus (Warren Brown) and John (Steven Mackintosh) make plans

Whilst researching this drama I found out that there's something like £45 billion worth of cash in the UK. Sitting in vaults, down the backs of sofas, and chinking around in our pockets.

We may think of ourselves as a cashless society, but it's still out there. And it's not worth any less.

I often use dual timelines when structuring a story. I did something similar on Worried About The Boy, flicking between 1981 and 1986. Maybe I just like to keep the audience on their toes.

With Inside Men, opening with the heist allowed me to get straight into two stories that impacted on one another. How did they plan it? And will they get away with it?

The scenes in the vault were filmed in a decommissioned Bank of England building in Bristol.

The vault door weighed four tonnes and you just can't recreate stuff like that.

I went on set one day and held one of the shotguns, pulled on a mask, and stared at the cages of bank notes. Suddenly it didn't seem so easy.

Tony Basgallop is the writer of Inside Men.

Inside Men continues on BBC One and BBC One HD on Thursdays at 9pm. For all programme times, please see the episode guide.

Read a BBC TV blog interview with Boy George, on Worried About The Boy - also written by Tony Basgallop.

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

Gigi joins the protest in Tahrir Square, 2011

The crew that worked on the programme across the year included a journalist, Inigo Gilmore, a Cairene ad-man turned revolutionary, Ayman Shabrawy and me, an Egyptian from Brum.

Inigo started to film with Gigi and Ahmed when he met them on the encampment on Tahrir Square's roundabout during those first electric 18 days in 2011 which ended with the dramatic resignation of Hosni Mubarak.

He had filmed with a view to following the story wherever it might lead - and we all knew that 18 days wasn't going to be the end of it.

As for me, I wasn't in Egypt when the revolution started. Born to Egyptian parents in Birmingham, my family and I were glued to the coverage of our people ousting the very regime my parents had fled.

When I stepped down off the plane in Cairo, in the ecstatic haze of the revolution's morning after, it was to follow up with Gigi and Ahmed on Inigo's request to look for a third character amongst the Islamists.

This would be a challenge as the Islamists had been quiet on the revolution itself but we knew that they were going to become major players in whatever happened next.

At the time it was incredible to be part of such optimism. The country was revolution crazy - one leading pizza store was even advertising 'democratic pizza' - where you could choose your own toppings. However, it didn't last.

Filming in Egypt was extremely difficult. Egyptian state television stoked up fears of foreign forces at work to destroy the country.

With Libya at war and Syria brutalised, there was a real anxiety that Egypt could end up with the fate of either.

Distinguished by my British-sounding Arabic and wielding a camera and tripod, the team was mobbed several times by people convinced that we were, at worse Israeli spies filming state secrets, and at best, foreigners up to no good.

So it wasn't altogether a pleasant ride. But who said revolutions are easy?

Most of the time we had no idea what would happen next. Initially, what looked like a lull was the calm before the storm.

Ahmed struggles to find work

At Tahrir Square, the revolutionaries constantly told me that the army would invade at any moment. Sometimes weeks would pass like that.

We spent the year waiting, wanting to be there when it happened but also wanting to be away from the protests, inside living rooms, listening to the real conversations on the other side of town.

At times, living through a revolution seems very ordinary - like Ahmed going to his barber the day after the fall of Mubarak.

For me this year has been extraordinarily difficult - trying to film in a country where many people were scared of finding fault with the military, the last bastion of national pride and security.

Where we were perceived to have an anti-military agenda we faced even more harassment, accused of being conspirators.

The Maspero massacre that features prominently in the film, where army tanks ran over protestors in October 2011, was a very dangerous moment in Egypt. The nation was splitting and our film was trying to straddle the divide.

Despite the negative events there is something overwhelmingly powerful about what I saw in Egypt this year - after 30 years of silence there is no way to turn to clock back - the price will be more deaths, but the prize is freedom.

May Abdalla is the director of Egypt - Children Of The Revolution.

Egypt - Children Of The Revolution is on BBC Two and BBC HD at 7pm on Friday, 3 February. For further programme times please see the upcoming broadcasts page.

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

Shaun and his baby

Even with good historical relations, the sensitivity was such that took us over a year to agree a modus operandi with the council.

We finally established a working protocol drafted by a QC working with the council, amended by the BBC and finally ratified by the most senior family court judge in Bristol.

The crux, we all agreed from the outset was, the welfare of any child involved has to come first. The details of what that means in specific situations is complex.

Then we started filming.

It took months of hard work to try and persuade people to take part to show the real nitty gritty of the actual cases with families.

In the meantime all we could do was film the more straightforward parts that we knew would provide the 'glue' to make all the programmes piece together, like shots of the city, simple meetings amongst the social workers.

What was key was that everyone got used to us being around with our cameras, so when real action happened later we could film it, unhindered.

How do you even ask a family who are probably in the worst place of their lives whether they would like to consider taking part in a television programme?

It's impossible to build up trust and understanding when you first contact someone.

When we got to the point of spending time chatting to people face to face in their homes, it became somewhat easier.

Slowly with patience and consideration we got somewhere, but I can never imagine a more difficult ask for members of the public.

We were able to offer a very different way of taking part - a system called rolling consent.

That meant anyone being filmed could choose to pull the plug and decide not to continue at any point in the process - after the first day, after six months or after they had seen the finished film.

We quickly learned that the only way to progress was to be a fully open book - to be honest and clear.

We showed everyone who took part the final film and agreed to change anything factually inaccurate and listen carefully to other objections (which didn't include anyone's hair looking bad on a particular day!).

Slowly we found people did have reasons for wanting to take part.

Some people wanted to pass on advice to others in similar life situations. As Shaun, one of the fathers says in the finished programme "appreciate it, love your children best. Don't go my way - I made the biggest mistake. I've lost my children and I try and fight for them - you know stay strong, don't give up."

For some our presence acted as further encouragement to make progress at home. For others who were battling with social workers, they wanted their side of events faithfully recorded.

So eventually we gained access into people's lives and started to film with a small crew of two or three people.

The stunning aspect of observational filming over a long period of time is the course of people's stories changes in ways that you could never imagine.

We never could have predicted that whole families who appeared to be united would fall apart in a matter of weeks. As John Lennon stated: "Life's what happens when you're busy making other plans...".

As we got more involved with the people's lives, we got to understand what a privileged position we occupied.

Social worker Annie

We were able to speak to the families in confidence (as long as it what they said did not affect the welfare of their children). At the same time we would hear the inside track from the social workers' point of view.

When some of the hard decisions needed to be made about the future of the children, we found ourselves overcome with emotion and often reeling for months after.

Surprisingly the social workers themselves were also deeply affected by certain cases that they became ensconced in, despite their extensive training to maintain professional boundaries with families. Somehow I found that reassuring.

This series will live with all who took part for the rest of their lives.

After three years of work we are finally able to show three hours of television that gives an insight into a world many of us never get to see, but one that continues around us in all our neighbourhoods.

Sacha Mirzoeff is the series producer of Protecting Our Children.

Protecting Our Children starts on BBC Two and BBC HD on Monday, 30 January at 9pm.

For further programme times, please visit the episode guide.

If you, or someone you know, have been affected by the issues raised in this programme, you can visit the information and support page (available until 23 March).

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

Isabelle Azaire (Clémence Poésy) and Stephen Wraysford (Eddie Redmayne)

This BBC version of Birdsong is described as "painterly" by Ben Stephenson (BBC controller for drama commissioning) - is that how you visualised it?
I wanted pre-war France to feel like a dream: crystal clear yet mysterious. The director of photography, Julian Court and I found a touchstone in a quote from the pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, who said a painting should be "a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be - in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no-one can define or remember, only desire... ".

What were your thoughts on tackling the erotic tone in parts of the book?
It's difficult in any area to translate something from a book to a film - they're both different. But it's particularly tricky with sex. Eddie Redmayne, Clémence Poésy and I spent long hours talking about it and we tried to be very clear about exactly what was going to happen in each moment - so that the build-up of sexual tension was done in a very precise and detailed way. What we tried to do was to make the experience of the audience watching match the intensity of the experience of reading the book.

There are two horrifying deaths in episode one - typical of WWI - how did you decide how gory to be in showing those deaths?
I suppose you try to make the deaths as powerful as possible, without making the audience switch off. The war was brutal and inhuman, with new technological ways of killing, like gas - so it feels important to reflect that fact... but to do so in a way that isn't self-defeating.

Did the actors visit war graves or the sites of conflict?
Both Eddie Redmayne and Joe Mawle visited the battlefields - and went into a newly discovered chalk tunnel in La Boiselle, with Peter Barton, a WWI historical consultant. I think they were some of the first people to be back inside the tunnel since the war itself. They found a poem, written on the chalk wall of the tunnel by a soldier almost 100 years earlier, which was incredibly moving. I also found the 1916 film of the Battle of the Somme extremely useful for research. Even in black and white, you could feel how hot and dusty it was and get a sense of the strange, upbeat energy of the soldiers - which was unlike anything I'd seen before.

Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) rejoins his men at the front

Were the sets built or on location?
For the war story, we built sets just outside Budapest. I felt the audience's experience of the trenches should be 360, so we searched for a piece of ground which gave us uninterrupted views of the horizon. Production designer Grant Montgomery used hundreds of dead trees, quarried chalk and reclaimed timber to create an extraordinary world. For the French story, set in pre-war Amiens, we filmed on location in Budapest. This was perhaps the trickiest bit, as there's no tradition of the kind of architecture we were looking for.

Can you tell us a little about the uniforms?
We couldn't find enough uniforms in London - and so decided to make them in Poland. Charlotte Walter the costume designer tracked down a company using looms that made exactly the same cloth the original uniforms, and under the watchful eye of the curator of costumes at the Imperial War Museum, Martin Boswell.

Where do you find the replica guns?
We brought some working guns over from London - which gets complicated and requires lots of paperwork, as everyone seems to think you're about to stage a coup! We also had some terrific Lee-Enfield replicas made in Budapest.

How does an actor safely smash a glass on set without getting hurt in the way that Laurent Lafitte (playing René Azaire) does in episode one?
The glass is made out of spun sugar, so it can smash without being dangerous.

What was your worst moment in production?
There was a day when were due to film a lyrical summer picnic sequence when - predictably - after days of sunshine, the Budapest monsoon began. But the day also contained one of my favourite moments, when Stephen and Isabelle's ankles touch on the boat trip. It's all about body language and eyes and faces... like a wildlife film but with humans in it.

Philip Martin is the director of Birdsong.

Birdsong continues on BBC One and BBC One HD on Sunday, 29 January at 9pm. Episode one is available to watch and download in iPlayer until Sunday, 5 February.

Fiona Wickham is the editor of the BBC TV blog.

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

The statue of Sultan Saladin in Kerak, Jordan

After the publication of my recent general history of the Crusades, I was approached by an independent production company with a view to developing a television series based on my work.

The Crusades, a three-part series was then commissioned by BBC Two, and I embarked upon an intense filming schedule that took me through Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, France, Italy and the UK over three months, writing and presenting the programme, and working with a brilliant production team.

It's been an extraordinary experience - from the grand spectacle of sailing down the Nile to the intimacy of handling tiny copper coins minted by crusaders - and an immense privilege.

One of the undoubted highlights was gaining access to the Aqsa Mosque archive in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City, to view a priceless, 800-year-old manuscript written by one of the closest advisors to the mighty Muslim Sultan Saladin, the man who re-conquered Jerusalem for Islam.

As far as I know, we were the first Western film crew allowed inside this library just yards from one of Islam's most revered holy sites, and it took months of delicate negotiation to secure permission. The manuscript didn't disappoint.

Its text lays bare Saladin's agony in July 1192, during the Third Crusade, when he decided to abandon Jerusalem to the Christians.

After years of campaigning, both he and his troops were shattered by exhaustion and Muslim morale was faltering.

Under these conditions, and with the crusaders camped just 12 miles away, Saladin judged that he had no hope of holding the Holy City once an attack began. That day he was said to have shed tears of grief as he led his people in prayer.

Richard the Lionheart and Saladin

The manuscript also shows Richard the Lionheart - leader of the Third Crusade - to have been no brutish hothead, but a canny and agile negotiator.

During a flurry of diplomatic exchanges, King Richard proposed an extraordinary marriage alliance between his sister Joan and Saladin's brother al-Adil.

This union would form the basis of a peace agreement in which 'the sultan should give to al-Adil all the coastal lands that he held and make him king of Palestine', with Jerusalem to serve 'as the seat of the royal couple's realm'.

With a flourish of seeming magnanimity, the Lionheart proclaimed that the acceptance of this deal would bring the crusade to an immediate end and prompt his return to the West.

Richard probably had little or no intention of ever following through with this deal. Instead, his aim seems to have been to sow seeds of doubt and distrust within the Muslim camp by playing upon Saladin's fear that his brother al-Adil might seek to usurp power for himself.

I was primed for these revelations, having spent years poring over printed versions of this account.

What I didn't realise was that this manuscript had had something of a secret life. Up until the early 20th Century, the Aqsa archive actually had served as a public lending library.

Amazing as it now sounds, from the later Middle Ages onwards, citizens of Jerusalem had been taking this Life Of Saladin home to read; and over the years some had even left their mark on its pages, inscribing comments ranging from 'Praise be to Allah' to 'It's raining today'.

For me, the experience of actually holding a manuscript written by a man who knew the great Sultan Saladin, who witnessed the Third Crusade first-hand, was simply electrifying.

I couldn't help wondering what all those other readers across the centuries had felt and thought as they held this same work.

Dr Thomas Asbridge is the presenter of The Crusades.

The Crusades continues on BBC Two and BBC HD on Wednesdays at 9.30pm. 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.

Scientists and contributors answer the question "What is your favourite colour?"

Clearly the intelligent questions of a scientific mind... but these really are some of the questions that scientists all over the world are asking. And, as the show's director, I jumped at the chance to make this episode and find some answers.

As we looked deeper into the scientific research, the more we found that this is a world which is just beginning to be properly explored. The scientists were bright, curious, often rather quirky, and full of fascinating discoveries.

One of the first people we met was neuroscientist Beau Lotto - a master of illusions who wanted to do an experiment to find out whether people of different ages, gender and nationality see colours in the same way.

Eight weeks later, there we were with 150 people, filming the Beau Lotto colour experiment bonanza.

The volunteers took part in eight different experiments veering from whether colour had an impact on time passing, to looking at how people made different colour patterns in mosaics, to what emotions people associated with different colours - red for anger, blue for tranquillity?

The results shocked even the scientist involved. Beau found that colour really can impact the passing of time.

Volunteers were asked to stand in three different colour pods bathed in either blue, red or white light, and Beau found that blue light made time pass more quickly and red seemed to slow it down.

"Red makes us highly aware of our environment and so time slows down in your mind," he says.

Another experiment found that women who are made to feel more psychologically powerful and in control were more sensitive to spotting changes in colour illumination.

Overall it seemed that depending on the experience we bring with us, our perceptions of colour can vary from person to person.

Beau says, "In thinking about 'do you see what I see', the answer depends on what it is we're looking at. If it's something that's shaped by our own individual experiences, then we can see the world very differently."

We really do perceive colours differently depending on experience, age and state of mind.

Dr Beau Lotto

Something else we found was that there were scientists looking at whether language can influence the way we perceive colour. Could the number of words you have for colour affect the way you perceive it?

The only way to find out was to go to a civilisation far from the technicolour world we live in, to a tribe who have only five words for colour, compared to the 11 essential colour categories.

The Himba of northern Namibia - who had never even set foot in a local town - call the sky black and water white, and for them, blue and green share the same word.

In having fewer words than us for colour, it seems that their perception of the world is different to ours - it takes them longer to differentiate between certain colours, and so we can determine from this that they see the world a little differently.

The tribe found us a bit of an oddity - they hadn't been filmed before - so when I played them back the footage we had filmed they thought it was the most hysterical thing they had every seen.

And what about the effects colours might have on us?

Scientists Russell Hill and Iain Greenlees were looking into the 'winning effect' of the colour red. They organised an experiment to see if wearing red might have an impact in sport.

They set up a penalty shoot out with 48 footballers looking at whether it was wearing red or seeing red that made the difference.

They found that the men wearing red had lower levels of cortisol, the hormone for stress, than those in blue or white. This in turn makes them more confident in their game.

These are just a few examples of the people we met and filmed. The whole thing was a technicolour experience that made us see the world through different eyes - and more than that, made us realise there's more to come.

This, for once, is a relatively new subject in the world of science, so there are many more discoveries to be made.

So when you get up tomorrow, look around you. Think about what colours you are going to wear and think about the colours you see - do you really see what I see? Probably not.

Sophie Robinson is the director and producer of Horizon: Do You See What I See?

Horizon: Do You See What I See? is on BBC Two and BBC HD at 9pm on Monday, 8 August.

Beau Lotto has written about how we perceive colour for BBC News.

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

Now, I know what you're thinking: How great must that be... all that lovely food, nice and cosy?

And for the most part it really is wonderful.

But I need you to picture a scene: two huge camerablokes, an equally ginormous soundy, moderate sized director, delightful home economist and me, all standing against two giant chillers on a piece of floor the length of two baguettes and as wide as a pie dish.

You see, Raymond's kitchen is real. Not a set built in a studio.

And that reality brings with it the enormous fun of working in one of the best kitchens in the world as well as a few tiny issues. One of them is there isn't much space.

This year we've had the added joy of the weather, which has reduced the ambient temperature of the kitchen to one in which my morning cuppa resembles a frothy sorbet in five minutes flat.

We filmed Heston's Perfect Christmas Dinner in Siberia with Heston Blumenthal and I swear the crew needed fewer clothes.

But it does have one advantage and that is my key job as series producer is cuddling Raymond Blanc to keep him warm.

It isn't in my contract but sometimes a producer just has to do these things to keep the team happy.

I told him he could cook wearing his salopettes and ski jacket but he insisted on wearing in his whites.

That's the kind of sacrifice Raymond will make for you viewers. The man is fearless in the face of adversity.

But you'll notice the camera never sees Raymond's feet.

That is because while cooking he is standing in a heated foot muff.

No sock warmers for the rest of the location team, which I like to think of it as small but perfectly formed.

In addition to Raymond's assistants (the gorgeous Adam Johnson and new boy Kush), our crew consists of the guys I mentioned before and one more without whom we would be lost.

He's the chap who comes in first and leaves last and that is our runner Rob.

As Raymond's kitchen is a working environment, most evenings when we leave at around 7pm, the kitchen is used to service the private dining room of Raymond's restaurant.

This means that all those bits of set decoration you see on the show - the copper pans, bottles of oil, posters etc - are all taken away and stored overnight.

We all help out to get it done as fast as possible, but it is Rob who is there in the mornings putting it all back out again exactly where it was the night before.

It's his hard work that means that I don't have to answer letters telling me that the poster of mushrooms in the background at the beginning of the tarte tatin recipe has morphed into Great Fish Of The World by the time the tarte comes out of the oven.

My gratitude to Rob knows no bounds.

And, as if he isn't treasure enough, he does the washing up, which deserves some kind of recognition, possibly from the Queen or, failing that, the people who own Fairy Liquid.

Particularly as being from Cheshire, he refuses to wear rubber gloves. They are for soft southern runners apparently.

Unsurprisingly we do generate terrific amounts of washing up.

That's partly because Raymond, being a man, has a need to use every utensil and bowl in the kitchen once before requiring it to be washed.

(I have to qualify that by saying that Raymond himself washes up beautifully and did so after Sunday lunch at my house despite my protestations.)

And as we usually film two recipes in a day you can imagine it piles up pretty quickly.

We try to shoot one recipe in the morning and another in the afternoon.

It may interest you to know that my rule of thumb is the simpler the recipe appears to be, the longer it will take to film.

Don't ask me why. I truly have no idea. It's a space, time, ingredient dimensional shift the answer to which may be uncovered in a kitchen far, far away.

Watercress soup took the record last year. Several basic ingredients, not including water - five hours and a nervous breakdown. Mine, not Raymond's.

Oh how we laughed. Not.

We film everything just once on two cameras so what you see is what we filmed at the time with a few extra shots that we charmlessly call 'dumps' or 'throw ins'.

Those are the close up shots of things going into pans or blenders that help us knit the programme together.

Making a cooking show is a lot like cooking itself. It requires lots of attention to detail, good ingredients, patience and most importantly, a whole lot of love.

And that, let me tell you, is what you get when you work with the kind of team I am blessed to have had on this show. I'm the luckiest producer in the world.

I really hope you enjoy watching it as much as I have enjoyed making it.

It means a lot to get feedback from people who watch the show and I'll do my best to respond to as many of your queries as possible.

Melanie Jappy is the series producer for Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets.

Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets is on BBC Two and BBC HD at 8.30pm on Monday, 21 February.

For further programme times, please see the upcoming episodes page.

Read more from Melanie at the BBC Food blog about Raymond Blanc's trip to Fife for the first episode of Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets.

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

When Cameron Balbirnie - the series producer on A History Of Ancient Britain - came to me and asked whether I would be interested in presenting a big, all-encompassing series examining the pre-history of these islands, I jumped at the chance.

The opportunity to present a major series on a subject I'm passionate about was a dream come true for me, and I think the fact that I had a background in archaeology meant I was a good fit for the project.

I dived in headfirst, getting involved early on in discussions with the production team that helped to shape the series.

Back in my student days it was the Mesolithic period that attracted me most strongly. Its special power lay, I think, in my basic desire to dig back into time as far as possible.

And that brought me, in the end, to the Scottish Mesolithic, the earliest known human habitation of my own country - between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago.

At this time people hunted red deer, harvested and processed hazelnuts. They also fished.

Mesolithic people, although still nomadic, lived quite local lives, being born, living, and dying perhaps in the same general location.

Having said that, I'd have to admit that during the making of A History Of Ancient Britain I was lured into even deeper time.

In England and Wales there have been tantalising finds of human occupation reaching even further back.

I was therefore blown away by the sight of the so-called Red Lady of Paviland.

This was in fact the bones of a young mammoth hunter who lived and died in what is now South Wales, before the onset of the last Ice Age. His remains are more than 33,000 years old.

Also profoundly moving was the sliver of horse bone found in a cave near Sheffield that had been the canvas for an artist around 13,000 years ago.

That piece of rib bone - sometimes known as the Creswell Crags horse engraving or the Robin Hood cave horse engraving - has on it an etching of a galloping horse.

It is, by any standards, a work of genius. It is composed of just a few confident lines and yet the end result is an image of a living breathing animal.

To come so close to the way some individual, man or woman, was thinking all those millennia ago, while the Ice Age waxed and waned, was very moving for me.

Neil Oliver is the presenter of A History Of Ancient Britain.

A History Of Ancient Britain is on BBC Two and BBC HD at 9pm on Wednesday, 9 February.

For further programme times, please see the upcoming episodes page.

Find out about ancient sites you can visit around the UK and find activities relating to ancient Britain on the BBC Hands On History website.

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

It constantly seeks to bring its audience something different that can't be found elsewhere, and encourages the presenters, actors, and producers who work for it to push at the boundaries of what might be expected.

And it does this, though, with a warmth and welcome, which allows everyone to feel at home.

HD is harder. And, along with all the others in the UK trying to explain what HD actually brings to television, we've tried a number of different approaches in the years since we started making and broadcasting programmes in HD.

In the beginning we talked about pixels and picture resolution. That explained things to those who understand television technology, but was baffling to most.

So, at the BBC in recent years, we've focussed on the programmes you can watch in HD, trying to convey the kinds of things we're making in HD.

And, through the choice of shots (close ups, slow-motion sequences), showing what the new HD format brings in terms of picture detail and, therefore, emotional involvement, whether you are watching the trail in SD or in HD.

But BBC One HD is a different channel from BBC HD. It's an old and familiar friend in new, up-to-the-minute clothes. And by now we know that most of you know of HD's existence.

So the trail that has been made tries to be true to BBC One - staying warm and down to earth - and to convey a little of the magic that HD is bringing to the channel.

It features stars from across BBC One, though shows them to you as you've never seen them before.

And while the promo was, of course, produced in HD, we've tried to style it so that even if you are watching them on one of the BBC's SD channels you will get a sense of what HD can mean for the television you already know and love, using colour and storytelling to make up for those extra pixels.

We launched BBC One HD in November. Since then we've been working on ensuring it runs smoothly, and on bringing even more programmes into HD.

EastEnders moved to HD on Christmas Day and, over the coming months, other favourites will join the BBC One HD family, including Have I Got News for You, Formula One, The Boat Race, Songs of Praise, Watchdog, and coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show.

You can always check the programme description in the information bar if you want to know whether a programme is in HD or not. Lots of you have been trying out the channel already, especially over the Christmas holidays.

BBC One HD can be found at Freesat channel 108, Freeview channel 50, Sky channel 143, Virgin channel 108.

BBC HD continues to broadcast HD programmes from all the BBC's channels, and can be found at Freesat channel 109, Freeview channel 54, Sky channel 169, Virgin channel 187.

UPDATE: You can watch the trailer on YouTube.

Danielle Nagler is head of BBC HD.

For a list of frequently asked questions and answers please visit the BBC One HD FAQ page.

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

From the primeval forests of Germania (as the Romans christened the place) to the Renaissance world of Durer, Altdorfer and Grunewald (what a painter of blood, sweat and tears he was!) to the Romantic castles of Bavaria and on into the deep, deep darkness of Munich and Berlin under the Nazis - ending with the art of the last 50 years, which in a very affecting, powerful way has all been about remembering, atoning, regenerating.

At times, when we were making these shows, I felt really weighed down by the almost unremittingly tragic patterns of German history.

Watching the programmes back, compared say with The Art Of Spain or The Art Of Russia, I was really struck by their relative solemnity and slowness of pace, which wasn't something we consciously set out to aim for.

It's just a question, I think, of form mirroring content. But I hope the experience of watching them is hopeful, at times even uplifting, rather than purely melancholic!

The actual art of Germany was so often created to lighten the gloom or to heal the wounds of the past.

So there's this constant seesawing in the series, between bleakness and hope, a kind of fight between grim political realities and art's ability to raise people up, to take them somewhere else.

And my goodness the art of Germany is wonderful.

I honestly believe that to many people in Britain it will be like travelling to an undiscovered country, full of barely known treasures.

Maybe I am wrong, but how many people watching at home will already be aware of the great limewood carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider (the greatest artist who ever set out to carve a piece of wood), the seething landscapes of Altdorfer, the bruised, mystical, almost empty world of Caspar David Friedrich, the solemn, strong, powerful photography of August Sander, the scabrous caricatures of Otto Dix, the genius of moderns such as Baselitz and Beuys?

I could go on and on, but I really am curious to know whether all this stuff will be as unfamiliar (or at least surprising) to the audience as I suspect it may be.

Most unfamiliar of all, I suspect, will be the material we cover in episode three, which is both the blackest and the most hopeful show of all.

In it, I attempt to demonstrate how the whole Nazi project was driven by a twisted sense of aesthetic priorities - to show how Hitler really did begin with art and architecture, poisoning culture as a dry run for his poisoning of Germany itself.

For me, it's the most surprising and revelatory of the stories we tell, but again, I am only guessing about its impact and I would be very interested to know what viewers make of that particular programme.

I think it'll be genuinely new and really shocking to many people. And I think it's an important piece of TV in its own way, because the opportunity to change people's ideas about a huge part of our shared history just doesn't come along that often.

But I'll just have to wait and see what everyone else makes of it...

The Art Of Germany follows The Art Of Spain and The Art Of Russia, with more to come, energy levels permitting! Which countries would you like to see more Art Of... from? Suggestions below please (no promises we'll make them into TV).

They are definitely as knackering as they are fascinating to make, what with six weeks on the road each time - and no, it's most definitely not five star luxury. I've got the photos to prove it.

But the truth is I've really loved doing the Art Of... sequence.

I think of it as a rolling 'series of series' not just about art and culture but cumulatively, a part-by-part history of the whole western world. A kind of alternative remake of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, done by stealth!

And of course Kenneth Clark never talked about the art of Spain, or indeed the art of Russia. I guess he must have thought they weren't entirely civilised places.

But then that's a very important part of the point of these programmes, to broaden the story of 'civilisation' and the story of art, away from the usual suspects and show people how much else there is to explore in the cultures of other less explored countries.

On that note, I suspect there's been a certain British reluctance to engage with German culture - with the obvious exception of German music - over the last generation or two, and I wonder if all the bitter memories of war have played a part in that.

As far as I know this is the first overview of the German art tradition made for British TV, so I just hope everyone watching gets something out of it (even Basil Fawlty!).

Andrew Graham-Dixon is presenter of The Art Of Germany, part of BBC Four's Germany season.

The Art Of Germany continues on BBC Four and BBC HD at 9pm on Mondays.

For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

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

It's the most reactive playout room in the world - when a news story breaks, a football match overruns or an election is called, the staff have to move extremely fast.

You can have a peep at the continuity announcer - whose voice you'll totally recognise as the 'voice of BBC One' but whose face you've probably never seen - rehearsing the junctions.

Watch the video on the HD website. There's also a good FAQs page for all things BBC One HD.

Also on the About The BBC blog, Joe Godwin, the director of BBC Children's is talking about his 20 years in children's programmes - and the mission of his department today:

"Who would have thought that one of the most popular and talked about shows on any children's channel in 2010 is about history (Horrible Histories)? Who could have imagined that the most watched drama on any children's channel is based on British books about a young girl in the care system (Tracy Beaker Returns)? And who would guess that programmes about dealing with bereavement, bullying or protecting yourself online would be getting kids across the UK talking (Newsround specials)?"

Fiona Wickham is editor of the BBC TV blog.