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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

After seeing some of the material for myself and ensuring that the producers and financiers were very ready to support a bold approach, it became an easy decision to sign up to what would become The Big Melt - How Steel Made Us Hard.

At first I came on board as director and then later, when we understood how nuanced our approach was to be, also as editor since we realised it would be impractical to include a third person in our immediate work process.

For the next few weeks, on and off, Jarvis and I immersed ourselves in several days’ worth of footage.

We depended upon our deep trust of one another and an existing shorthand for communication that we have developed through working together closely many times over the years.

It’s safe to say, I could not have worked in this way with anyone else and I believe the film we have made together is, because of this, unique.

We worked in ‘chunks’, grouping film footage in various ways: sometimes by explicit subject, (there was lots of footage of turn-of-the-century workers emerging from factory gates); sometimes by visual texture (contrasty shots of steel lattice work); and sometimes by more latent connotations footage had (lots of material featured young people and this instinctively felt important).

Simultaneously, we gathered recorded music that we felt was appropriate in different ways.

For example, the music from Kes seemed to chime with the footage of the Rotherham youth putting two fingers up to the camera.

Some music was chosen because of its links with Sheffield: the live music premiere of the film was to open Sheffield Doc Fest 2013, which was also celebrating 100 years of stainless steel making (Richard Hawley and The Human League).

Other times it was simply that music seemed to have a certain mood that fitted our intention: the Max de Wardener track had a manic, ritualistic feel that helped with the idea of people gathering for strange ceremony.

At another level, the music was always aiming to have an eclectic, celebratory function.

Once we had these various chunks, we began to try and fit them together in such a way as to build something that both developed and made some formal sense.

A big guiding factor here was the live performance of the music with the film – we wanted to give the audience an experience that had various gear changes and eventually built to a massive crescendo and then a decaying coda.

We also worked and reworked the internal details of the chunks in order to develop motifs that worked across the film and helped develop something of a subtext to the basic action.

The Crucible Theatre (where the premier took place) has a deep, horseshoe stage.

With 52 musicians coming and going in the half-light, even a 10 metre screen (the biggest that would fit within the proscenium) meant that the film played second fiddle to the music that night.

But that was how it was always meant to be. That’s what led us into such interesting territory.

Of course we also wanted the film to eventually be able to stand on its own feet and hold an audience for over 70 minutes - no mean feat for a non-narrative piece.

Ultimately, I felt the best way to achieve this was to take a playful approach with the archive material, an approach that 'unshackled' the archive from its typical function of illustrating history literally.

I wanted to use it so as to trigger lots of associations between the various clips, so that the viewer helped give it new meanings.

In my head, I approached the editing with the idea that I was building something of an alternative history, one that perhaps had echoes of some kind of extraterrestrial conspiracy theory; a twisted time-capsule for future generations.

At the same time, though, I wanted to retain what I saw as the deeper, 'emotional' truth about how steel production changed the world and affected deeply the people who had toiled to make this possible.

I don’t know if Jarvis was nervous on stage the night of June 12th when we performed, but I do know that as the lights dimmed and I looked on from the mixing desk, pushing the play button on the film, I certainly was.

Now that we've fixed the film and the live music in time - I hope some of that tingling excitement can still be felt.

Martin Wallace directed and edited The Big Melt - How Steel Made Us Hard.

The Big Melt - How Steel Made Us Hard is part of Storyville on BBC Four at 9pm on Sunday, 26 January.

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

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.

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’.

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.

His father Ross McManus sadly passed away during the time we were preparing the production and this led to him discovering a great deal of material he hadn’t seen before.

Not least some very evocative photographs of his dad playing the trumpet in bebop jazz groups that he led in Liverpool and Birkenhead in the late 1940s and early 50s, as well as scrapbooks full of gig flyers and programme notes that Elvis was happy to share with us.

Elvis had also recently found a show-stopping piece of film of his father with the Joe Loss Orchestra, the leading British dance band of the 1950s and 60s.

Elvis first showed it to me in a New York restaurant. I had seen footage of Ross on YouTube, in black and white, but this was in screaming colour: Elvis’s dad was dancing away to a cover of the early 60s hit If Had A Hammer.

Moments like that are unforgettable – when you come across a piece of archive that you know is going to provide a film with one of its highs.

Later, Elvis' archivist, who looks after the Elvis archive and official website, produced some footage of Elvis and the Attractions on tour in 1978.

Four young musicians clearly on the rampage, taunting the audience in classic punk fashion and driven by the energy of a band who know they are making it big in the USA.

Material like this tells a story in a way that words cannot, and we were lucky that it came our way.

Telling the story of a person’s life requires the best archive possible – and with Elvis Costello, we were more than well served.

Not least as he engaged so unreservedly with making the best documentary possible.

Mark Kidel is the director of Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance.

Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance is a documentary with two versions. The 60 minute version is on Friday, 8 November at 9pm and the feature-length version is on Saturday, 9 November at 11.45pm, both on BBC Four. For further programme times please see the upcoming broadcasts page.

More on Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance
BBC Four: Interview with Mark Kidel
Huffington Post: Elvis Costello: Making the First-Ever Documentary Portrait
The Arts Desk: Mystery Dance: On filming Elvis Costello

More on Elvis Costello
BBC Radio 6 Music: The First Time With... Matt Everitt speaks to Elvis Costello
BBC Glastonbury 2013: Elvis Costello Glastonbury highlights 
BBC Radio 4: Desert Island Discs: Castaway Archive: Elvis Costello

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

The Queen's Coronation was an epoch-making moment in broadcasting history – it was the first time the television audience exceeded the radio audience. It was also the largest outside broadcast that the BBC had ever undertaken.

In 1953 TV technology was in its infancy and video recording had not been invented, so the only way the BBC could retain a copy of what was transmitted on that day was by filming the output - basically pointing a camera at a 405-line television monitor!

The BBC did this using 35mm black and white film. Recording the broadcast onto film and storing it for 60 years brings its own problems, like dirt and scratches.

These film faults were not part of what the public actually saw on the day, therefore our challenge was to restore the pictures as closely as possible to how people would have experienced them at the time.

The 35mm film rolls only lasted around 10 minutes, so an immense 45 film rolls were used in total.

After cleaning the rolls I scanned them to make digital files, taking care to capture the full picture area available.

This revealed more of the image than was seen on previous versions, bringing it in line with the live broadcast in 1953.

I then painstakingly graded each shot, which involves adjusting the brightness and contrast levels to maintain a consistently good looking image, whilst removing film defects, including fine dust, dirt and occasional damage.

The film cameras which had been pointing at their own TV screen in order to record continuously had each applied their own particular distortions to the original video image. This resulted in big 'jump-cuts' when the film rolls were joined.

The original broadcast did not have this problem so I used a digital effect to warp the image each side of the join to match them as closely as possible and then quickly dissolved between the two reels.

This resulted in a much smoother transition - practically invisible and hopefully achieves the seamless quality of the original broadcast shots.

The final stage was adding the soundtrack. The audio has survived well and you can hear the subtleties of tones, the hush of the Abbey.

The commentary is very gentle, very considered and very regal – it sounds brilliant. I'm pleased with the results – the pictures are sharper, clearer and now much closer to the original broadcast images seen by 20 million viewers back in 1953.

Jonathan Wood is a colourist for The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II begins at 10.10 am on Sunday, 2 June on BBC Parliament.

More on The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II:
About The BBC blog: How the BBC documented the Queen's Coronation coverage 60 years ago
BBC News: How the Coronation kick-started the love of television
BBC News: In pictures: Queen's Coronation 1953

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