One of my responsibilities is the health and safety of crews in remote and sometimes hostile locations.

Our team was trained by ex-Special Forces medics. We included on our hazard assessment list: Ebola virus, landmines and piracy.

Attacks by wild animals were well down the risk list but an ever-present potential threat.

In all, the production took four years to make with the main filming period lasting around two and a half years.

In order to get the perfect shot, one cameraman had to sit in the water beside a dead whale while it was being eaten by some 30 great white sharks.

Another was trapped up a tree all night in the line of duty.

Most forest elephants were relaxed around us, but for four hours, one unusually aggressive elephant tried to shake him out of his tree platform!

Two crew members strayed into minefields whilst answering calls of nature. 

Fortunately, everyone has come home safely.

One of the main reasons people enjoy wildlife series is for the sense of escapism - there's an expectation of beauty, fascination and wonder.

Sometimes, when watching the films, it's easy to forget that a film crew was there at all.

In these landmark series, sumptuous photography is something we know our audience expects - yet it relies on oblivious wildlife and on the patience and skill of the camera operators.

No great shot is ever a given. And few great shots come without great effort.

We helped drive the development of a new HD starlight camera system, used in the opening episode to film a night-time rhino party in intimate detail.

And super-slow motion allowed us to capture a giraffe fight that will change your view of these 'gentle' giants forever. 

Technology not only transforms how we perceive Africa's iconic animals, it can also make things a little safer. 

Remotely operated HD cameras can go where we cannot. We used them with lions in the Serengeti, with shoebills in Zambia and with a massive five metre long python in Uganda.

No matter how intrepid and determined the team, the director is not going to send anyone into a burrow belonging to such a massive snake.

Pythons have a severe bite, not to mention the power to crush their victims to death.

Fortunately we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to film a wild, but rescued snake in a wildlife sanctuary.

She'd laid eggs and we carefully recreated her natural environment inside a special filming burrow.

Sometimes for safety or welfare reasons we film in controlled conditions, as it's the only way to glimpse some great new behaviour - in this case, her surprisingly tender maternal care.

Macro filming - the filming of insects and tiny animals - is a particularly tricky part of the craft, because you need lots of light and because the faintest breath of wind renders the whole image bouncing in and out of frame.

So there will always be a need to control those conditions to some extent, with lights and special lenses.

It's not something that we will detail every time but we show an example of this in the Eye To Eye section at the end of episode five, when a five-minute sequence of silver ants is painstakingly built-up over 30 days under the blistering Saharan sun.

We know that there is increasing interest in our various filming techniques and some of you will want to know when we do this sort of filming. 

So we have adopted a more explicit style of commentary. And throughout the series, we'll illustrate our techniques in more behind-the-scenes clips like the ones in this blog post.

Aside from filming in controlled conditions, we're confident our audience are familiar with much of the wildlife film-maker's craft and don't need to highlight it all, in favour of maintaining the sense of escapism.

Our goal is to tell nature's stories in a dramatic and factually accurate way. And what we show is always the biological truth. 

James Honeyborne is the series producer of Africa.

Africa begins on Wednesday, 2 January at 9pm on BBC One. 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.

The Paradise club theme

The musical style and period is something I am pretty familiar with and it's a favourite of mine; I had just finished a late 50s jazz-type score for We'll Take Manhattan, (which incidentally my pal John McKay wrote about on this blog).

A tricky part was making series two sound like the established, spare landscape of The Hour, but moving it on, making it particular to the new situations and characters and adding my own composer's voice.

Every composer has personal preferences, I suppose - harmonies, intervals, instrumentation, textures.

There were many lively discussions with the directors, editors, producers and executive producers about getting the tone just right, the balance between irony and sincerity, or whether certain scenes needed music at all - and opinions differed greatly.

At one point, I had to bail out of a particularly fraught sound mixing session and just let the team thrash it out.

The hardest part of the job was the time pressure, and as the schedule continued this got tighter. The first episode is invariably the hardest as the tone needs to be established to everyone's satisfaction.

I think this series is more directly emotional than the first.

A big theme is an inability to confront emotional truths, and the score reflects this: more lyrical perhaps, more expressive and thematic, though in a restrained way.

Over the course of the series, I used a range of instruments including piano, various saxophones, acoustic bass, vibraphone, celesta, percussion and drums - and also an amazing cellist (Nicholas Holland).

I've waited all my life for someone to ask me for a big classic news theme and the 'show within the show' finally gave me an opportunity.

The Hour's programme theme

For me, it needed to be very 1950s, confident and authoritative.

I based the theme on the well-known phrase "Cometh the hour, cometh the man," and included chiming bells and 'ticking' percussion - as I tried to do throughout the score - to root it to the idea of The Hour.

I wasn't responsible for the title music - I was spared the honour, and the agony, of trying to replace Daniel Giorgetti's great theme - but new situations demanded new material and writing for character is something I particularly enjoy.

The hidden depths to Randall Brown, the new head of news

Randall Brown, played by Peter Capaldi, is the new head of news and I suppose his music reflects his eccentricity and intellect, also his hidden emotional depths.

It seemed to work well alongside Peter's enigmatic performance. It's on a marimba which is like a big xylophone, with alto sax and acoustic bass.

I began my career as a percussionist in a rock band.

Bongos and Latin percussion, which had featured a little in the music for the first series, seemed ideal for Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) with his Beatnik experiences and the fresh energy he brings to news reporting - we even gave him a little space-age Sputnik sound, like some sort of radio transmission, a sine wave through an echo effect.

Freddie Lyons: Bongos and Latin percussion

The music for the nightclub hostess Kiki DeLaine and her boss Raphael Cilenti (Vincent Riotta) begins like a siren song and gets more obsessive and psychological as the story progresses.

I asked Helen Hamilton from the band Death Rattle to add a vocal to it - her voice has a similar haunting, girlish quality to Kiki's.

Enter Kiki...

Although Bel is a central character, she doesn't often have music of her own; it's usually about the unfamiliar and sleazy surroundings in which she finds herself.

Bel and Freddie's theme

There is a chiming piano and alto saxophone theme that accompanies her awkward interactions with Freddie - bittersweet and yearning.

Kevin Sargent is the composer on The Hour.

The Hour continues on Tuesdays at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC HD. For further programme times, please see the episode guide.

More on The Hour:
Guardian TV & Radio blog: Vicky Frost on The Hour episode by episode
Life Of Wylie: The Hour 2 Q&A transcript
Cultbox: The Hour series 2 episode 2 teasers

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

Watch how Shellon and her fellow parents get on with their babies at work

Mahdka, my daughter, was just five months old when I returned to work three days a week. I was excited at the prospect of having her with me every day and as a result didn't feel any of the anxiety many new mums feel when they go back.

Although there were initially a few sceptics in the office on the whole my colleagues were supportive of the idea of bringing babies to work.

I also promised myself I would work extra hard to prove the sceptics wrong - and I succeeded.

As far as concentration went I soon realised that you have to be able to multi-task.

Both baby's routine as well as scheduling your day can be adjusted so that you get the bulk of your work done while they are napping.

I started taking my break when it was Mahdka's lunch time and ensured I had all the basics and toys close to hand at all times.

Most importantly it is key to remember that it is your baby, therefore your responsibility, although each parent did have a buddy that took the baby if you're in a meeting or baby's really upset while you are on a call.

There were a few initial teething problems and during the trial period Mahdka was doing just that, teething!

She was uncharacteristically restless and it meant that I did spend a little more time soothing her in the baby change room than I would have liked to.

Shellon Beckford with Mahdka

However I have to say that the positives definitely outweighed the negatives.

Having Mahdka with me in the office meant that I saved £943 a month on childcare and even more valuably I was with her every day watching her grow and develop, something I would definitely have missed out on if she was at the nursery every day.

The Babies in the Office scheme also helped Mahdka with her own personal development. She was interacting with so many different people on a daily basis, something she may not have had the benefit of in childcare.

An extra and unexpected bonus of the scheme is the boost to morale in the office: I have made great friends with colleagues in departments that I had never even spoken to before!

You'll see in the programme that by the end of the month-long trial those colleagues who had said it would never work had changed their minds and realised that it was possible to continue to work with minimal disruption.

It was agreed that babies under the age of one would continue to be allowed at workers' desks and children any older would be placed in the on-site nursery.

I am now waiting for the nursery to be completed so I can continue to bring Mahdka into the office with me every day.

Shellon Beckford features in Babies In The Office.

Babies In The Office is on Tuesday, 17 July at on 7pm on BBC Two and BBC 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.

Actor Youssef Beruain playing a rioter

Five people died and over 2,500 shops and businesses were damaged. To date 1,290 rioters have been sent to jail.

After those shocking days the media erupted with politicians and commentators discussing what had happened and why.

But nobody was hearing from the people directly involved in the disorder to find out what they had to say about their behaviour. Why had they acted like they did? Were they sorry or would they do it again?

One reason for this silence is that those who had been caught were mainly in custody. Those who hadn't been caught didn't want to appear on camera for fear of public judgement, reprisals or arrest.

There was no government inquiry into the causes and consequences of the unrest. Into this void stepped Reading The Riots.

Conducted by the London School of Economics and The Guardian, this social research project interviewed 270 people who were involved in the disorder.

The interviews were conducted anonymously to allow those involved to speak more freely.

The BBC didn't get involved until after the interviews were completed, so the production team played no role in the decision to grant anonymity to those the researchers spoke to.

As a TV production team, we were faced with the decision whether to use this important and illuminating piece of work, even though it granted anonymity to criminals.

In our view it was justified because of the insights it provides into why and how the riots had happened. Even we, the programme makers, were never to know the true identities of the people featured in the research and subsequently, The Riots: In Their Own Words.

As the assistant producer I worked with my colleagues to think about how the research could be brought to life on television and accessed by a wider audience.

The original interviews had been recorded as audio files and this led us to approach the dramatist Alecky Blythe.

Youssef and Alecky Blythe

Alecky creates plays from real interviews - mixing journalism with drama to create what is called verbatim theatre.

She uses a performance style called recorded delivery, requiring actors to wear earphones.

The cast don't learn any lines. Instead they listen to the recording and talk a few seconds behind, mimicking the tone and pace of delivery so that they capture the essence of the person and the intention of the words as they were first spoken.

The result is a very naturalistic and believable performance.

We were excited about the potential of this delivery for television because we felt it would give veracity to our dramatisation.

Working with Alecky, we selected 11 interviews to recreate extracts of. Hopefully viewers would experience the original interviews in a manner as true-to-life as possible, while we could maintain the anonymity of the interviewees.

The dialogue is startlingly candid and confiding because neither the interviewer or interviewee are presenting themselves to the public, but engaging in a conversation protected by anonymity for the purposes of social research.

Whilst we are able to listen in to these accounts to garner fresh insights, viewers may feel frustrated or even angry because the tone of the interviews is very different to what we might expect from BBC TV: as journalists we challenge our interviewees and ask them to justify their words, but we can't here.

Similarly we can't elucidate what our characters say or ask them to explain references that they make.

Some speak in a street vernacular that is likely to be unfamiliar to many BBC Two viewers and some of the nuances and context of what they talk about are in danger of being lost.

To balance viewpoints over the two-part series, episode two features testimony from police officers who were on the frontline during the riots and offers a very different perspective upon what happened on those nights.

Alecky's method presented a new challenge to us in translating this technique from stage to screen.

Actor Calum Callaghan wearing an earpiece

On stage the headphones can be visible and accepted as a stylistic device. On screen we wanted naturalism so camera, sound and make up all worked together to ensure the earpieces were invisible at all times.

Each actor was given one tiny earpiece that could be disguised by hair and make up and one larger earpiece that would be hidden by the camera angle.

Many of the actors thrived using the technique and if anything, the challenge will be reminding the audience that they are watching actors and not documentary footage.

The actor Calum Callaghan said to me: "It felt fresh and was such an electric way of working. It's also surprising how informative someone's voice is - I could imagine how he would sit and what he'd be doing with his hands. You just let go and trust what you hear".

Nicola Cutcher is the assistant producer of The Riots: In Their Own Words.

The Riots: In Their Own Words was originally scheduled for Monday, 16 July but was postponed after a judge overseeing a riot-related trial in Birmingham issued a court order preventing it from being broadcast.

The trial has ended and the first programme will now be shown on Monday, 13 August at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC HD.

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

Northern white rhinos in Kenya

One of the greatest things about the reserves and conservancies of East Africa is simply the density of animals. In many cases there is no need to wait around to see a big, hairy and often deadly African animal because you'll probably stumble upon one without even trying.

Elephants are on the roads, lions roar all night just metres from your tent and you can even walk into a one-tonne buffalo while on your way to breakfast - as I did one bleary-eyed morning last week.

So filming animals in this environment should be a breeze right?! Well, think again.

For Secrets Of Our Living Planet we were looking for remarkable relationships between animals, many of which have not been shown on TV before, and this more than anything requires planning, patience and a bit of luck.

Unfortunately today our luck began to run out, albeit briefly.

We were out to film the white rhino which has been reintroduced to Kenya and has a vital role to play in Africa's grasslands.

Thanks to large mouths and hindgut digestion white rhinos can eat their way through a lot of tall dry poor-quality grass that many other African grazers can't eat.

That allows the other smaller-mouthed antelopes to access the quality grass that grows up once the grass is cut short.

In many ways the rhino is like a giant lawnmower on the African savannah - keeping the grass short and sweet.

On our team was Steven, a rhino patrol officer who manages a team of watchmen - sentinels who follow and sometimes even sleep out with the white rhinos to monitor their movements.

Early one morning we followed the dust kicked up by Steven's motorbike as he took us to the site of the latest rhino sighting.

Slowing on the approach so that the sound of the engine wouldn't scare off our quarry the cameraman and I jumped out of the car onto the cracked earth.

The rhino was now in thick bush and we could no longer track it with the car. To film it we had to go in, but following an animal the size of a car and armed with a giant horn into the bush is not something to be taken lightly.

In such a situation your imagination might lead you to expect that you will soon be making a swift exit with a big animal on your tail.

However in reality there was only one way to find out.

Led by Steven, keeping low on the ground and trying to keep out of sight, we managed to film a group of three white rhinos.

However our swift exit came soon enough.

In a strange turn of events for dry season Africa the sky had turned black and it was pelting hail that chased us out of the bush and back into the cars.

Within minutes the roads became rivers and we slipped and skidded our way back to camp.

'They're the closest thing we have to mammalian dinosaurs'

We hadn't quite managed to film the white rhino behaviour that we wanted on that day. As with all natural history filmmaking many things are filmed that end up on the cutting room floor - and this was just one of those occasions.

It was a few days later that we filmed the scene that made the final cut, in our next and most remarkable encounter with the white rhino.

This time luck was on our side: the sun was shining and the rhinos were out on the open plains where they sometimes feed in the morning before retreating into the thicker bush in the heat of the day.

Here we managed to film the same three individuals with Chris Packham - see how it went in the clip above!

Jasper Montana is a researcher for Secrets Of Our Living Planet and location director of episode two, The Secret Of The Savannah.

Secrets Of Our Living Planet continues on Sunday, 24 June at 8pm on BBC Two.

Analogue viewers can watch on Monday, 25 June at 11.50pm in Northern Ireland and 11.20pm in Wales. For further programme times, please see the episode guide.

The series will be available on iPlayer until Sunday, 15 July 2012.

And for more information about analogue television and the digital switchover please visit Help Receiving TV and Radio.

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

Simon Reeve in Indian Ocean

We visited 16 countries in all and spent more than six months filming, putting in some serious miles on the road.

The immediate image that people have of the Indian Ocean is tropical islands but of course it's a much larger area than just the beautiful parts.

It's the third largest ocean on the planet and a home to the paradise islands of countries like the Seychelles but also Somalia which is one of the most difficult and dangerous places to film, as well as desperately poor countries such as Bangladesh.

It's a region with a complete mix of life and we tried to reflect that in the series.

I'm the presenter and also closely involved in all aspects of the shows from initially coming up with the idea through to helping to decide what we film, then editing, scripting and voiceovers.

We're a small team and I loved the whole process of discussion - and occasionally heated debate - as we decided what we were going to film and where we would visit during our travels.

We couldn't visit every country around the edge of the ocean and we certainly couldn't travel every mile of the coastline so we had to pick the best spots for filming based on the likelihood of us actually being able to tell a story, show an issue or see a stunning sight.

It largely comes down to probability. The question we ask is how likely are we to be able to get to a place, see what we need to film to tell a story and then get out again without vast expense?

The end result is TV with a blend of travel, current affairs, wildlife, history, culture, global issues, local concerns and of course, some weird food.

Watch Simon eat curried fruit bat

You've got to have some strange food on a journey like this.

On the road the other team members were drawn from a small but brilliant pool.

Four of us went out from the UK and there was a slightly different team for each leg of the journey.

I also had two of the best cameramen in the business, Jonathan Young and Craig Hastings who each filmed around half of the series.

They have a remarkable talent for capturing stunning footage, spontaneous encounters and tricky situations.

And remember they do everything I do, often going backwards and carrying more than 12kg on their shoulder.

Together we were privileged to visit some of the most glorious islands in the world while filming this series and one personal highlight for me was meeting Brendon Grimshaw, an 86-year-old Brit on the island he bought in the Seychelles in the 1960s for £8,000.

He's been living the dream in paradise ever since.

But for the third programme in the series we travelled to Mogadishu in Somalia, one of the most dangerous places on the planet, where we needed flak jackets, helmets and even 'blast boxers' - armoured underwear - to protect us against IEDs and grenade attacks.

Watch Simon on a mission with AMISOM soldiers in Mogadishu

We had Ugandan peacekeepers from the African Union Mission In Somalia (AMISOM) looking after us and they took us to the frontline several times during active combat.

Their organisation is battling to stabilise Somalia and halt piracy and it's a frightening and tragic place.

Producer-director Andrew Carter, cameraman Jonathan Young and I were the small team.

We've all had extensive experience of similar situations and completed Hostile Environment courses where you're taught the essentials of survival.

But when you're there the main thing you think about is getting the story on film.

That's the whole point of a series like this: to show viewers what life is like in these remote parts of the world.

Simon Reeve is the presenter of Indian Ocean.

Indian Ocean continues on Sunday, 13 May 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 Sunday, 10 June.

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.

Mary shows us an ancient Roman communal tomb

So, what do I try to get over to my students?

First that ordinary Romans are just as interesting as the toffs - the generals and emperors - and that there is still loads that we can find out about them.

They really come alive again if you take the trouble to listen to what they have to say.

Secondly that they were in some ways just like us.

I love the story of Allia Potestas, the ex-slave who was living with two blokes - the tombstone says that she was always up first and went to bed last (the woman doing the housework as ever).

And yet in some ways they were utterly different. Just think, for example, of all those communal loos.

That makes the Romans really interesting to try to get to know.

Mary Beard on the communal loo at Ostia near Rome in episode two

But it also shines the spotlight back on ourselves and on some of the things that we take for granted without much thinking about.

Your average ancient Roman would be gob-smacked for example at the way we separate our children off from the adult world, with their special food and clothes and books.

No turkey twizzlers in ancient Rome (and that's not just because the Romans didn't have turkeys)!

It's almost impossible to pick a favourite bit of the series.

But I don't think I shall ever forget unpacking the almost 100 teeth found in the drain of a dentist's shop in the Forum. Every one had clearly been extracted, and every one was rotten to the core. Just think of the pain.

And the ancient Roman bar-keeper who called himself Calidius Eroticus ('Mr Hot Sex') has made a pretty indelible impression too.

Mary introduces us to a resident of ancient Rome - the baker

And what was I particularly sad didn't in the end make the cut? Again it's hard to say.

But I had really enjoyed going underground to explore Rome's Great Drain (it's still in use and we all had to be togged up in masks and germ-proof outfits).

And I learnt a lot when we actually made up some of the weird potions that the Romans recommended as contraceptives!

Mary Beard is the presenter of Meet The Romans.

Meet The Romans continues on Tuesday, 24 April at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC 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.

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.

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.

Professor Brian Cox: Stargazing LIVE series two trailer

One of the key things that has helped maintain this passion is that no matter how much we learn about the Universe, there will always be more secrets to be uncovered.

It's been fantastic to be the astronomer on Stargazing LIVE, to work with Dara O'Briain and Brian Cox along with an incredible crew.

In the last series this involved me teaching astronomy to Jonathan Ross in his back garden, explaining how to take astronomical photographs and showing people the wonders of the night sky live on national TV.

It's been manic in the run up to this second series. Already we have two short film sequences complete, one which is a beginner's guide to telescopes and binoculars and another which is about light pollution.

Trying to get people to think about the amount of excess light they are using is one of the big themes of the series.

We want to demonstrate that even the smallest places create a heck of a lot of light, so I'm now on my way to Dulverton in Somerset to prepare for this year's biggest challenge - on the third night I will be attempting to get all the lights of the town simultaneously turned off live on air!

I'm pretty nervous about this as it relies entirely on people responding positively and agreeing to join in. It's all out of my hands when it comes to the show regardless of how much work we put in campaigning over the next two days.

Stargazing series one: Jonathan meets Jupiter

There are loads of other great things coming up in the new series too and we want you to get involved.

You can send in your pictures and questions to the team and we will try to answer as many as possible in the follow-on show Stargazing LIVE: Back To Earth which happens straight after Stargazing LIVE.

There are also hundreds of events up and down the country for you to go along to.

We've also got some great new graphics plus an updated star and moon guide and loads of other resources downloadable from the website to show you what you can look for in the skies over the UK during January so you can get out and stargaze for yourselves.

Last year's show was great, even my 'missed meteor moment' was hilarious but we have loads of bigger and better things planned for this year and frankly, I can't wait for the first show.

Mark Thompson is the astronomer on Stargazing LIVE.

Series two of Stargazing LIVE begins on Monday, 16 January at 8.30pm on BBC Two and BBC HD. For further programme times, please see the upcoming epsiodes page.

On Thursday, 19 January at 2pm, Professor Brian Cox will present a live, interactive lesson from Jodrell Bank in collaboration with The Big Bang Fair. All UK schools can join in on the BBC red button.

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

Audience members waiting for the music to start at the BBC Proms

Not any seat. Not a seat in the auditorium: I wanted one on the stage.

Fortunately fate conspired to make that a reality and ten years later I stepped out onto probably the world's most viewed stage (the concert is broadcast worldwide) with a palpable sense of arrival.

Twenty years on and sitting on the front desk of the viola section, some of the novelty has inevitably worn off but the party atmosphere in the hall for the second half hits me between the eyes every time (while the viola section's party poppers hit the back of my head!).

Controversial though some of the antics of the Last Night of the Proms are, (a former controller of the Proms tried to ban the off-putting klaxons and whistles) let us not forget that as well as a celebration it is still a concert.

The 74th consecutive concert in the world's biggest music festival.

A long concert to boot that needs just as much preparation as the eleven others the BBC Symphony Orchestra has done this season.

We still have the pressure of microphones, cameras in your face (literally) and numerous solos to perform to the millions listening and watching.

After a long, hot summer sweating in the Albert Hall it's no wonder that sometimes there can be a few grey faces in the orchestra!

It's been interesting comparing the different conductors who have accepted the 'poisoned chalice' various Proms controllers have offered them over the years.

I'm too young to recall Malcolm Sargent so for my money I'd say Andrew Davis was positively born for the task.

This year we had the youngest ever maestro to take on the challenge since Henry Wood himself: step forward English National Opera's Music Director Edward Gardner.

Plus he's also a Brit, which some people think is important.

I don't think it is particularly; the Vienna Philharmonic play their waltzes just as well if the conductor is Indian, American, French or Japanese.

We can similarly manage an Elgar march and Parry's Jerusalem.

In fact, Ed let slip in rehearsals that he has never conducted Pomp and Circumstance or Jerusalem before.

Edward Gardner conducting at the Last Night of the Proms

I got to the hall at 10am on Saturday only to find Roger Wright watching the England rugby team three points down to Argentina in the artist's bar.

I silently hope that's not a bad omen... we had a quick chat and he seemed remarkably fresh considering he'd attended all the Proms and had to deal with the inevitable last minute artist cancellations.

Ed Gardner too looked pretty relaxed. Just as well as this was just about the most frantic general rehearsal there is, what with three hours to rehearse two and a half hours worth of music.

But he kept his cool - and even finished five minutes early.

More importantly he was splendid on the night itself: cutting a dash on the podium, his easy manner was always going to be a hit with the crowd (I mean, audience).

Not a bad speech either. I'd wager this won't have been his last Last Night, although he still has quite a few years to do until he catches up with some of us...

Phil Hall is the BBC Symphony Orchestra's sub-principal viola player. He is a regular contributor to the BBC Radio 3 Blog.

Part one of The Last Night of the Proms was broadcast on Saturday 10th Sept at 7.30pm on BBC Two and BBC HD.

Part two of The Last Night of the Proms was broadcast on Saturday 10th Sept at 9.10pm on BBC One.

Watch a video of Conductor Edward Gardner and the orchestra preparing for The Last Night of the Proms on the About the BBC Blog.

Terry Pratchett

He is brilliant at wrestling with the moral conundrums that the subject throws up - not least because he is genuinely considering some form of assisted death for himself.

But I was still surprised at how emotional he found the experience of making this film.

I had never seen him cry until we went to Switzerland.

We knew that if we wanted this film to be entirely honest about assisted dying then it was important to show the whole process, including the death itself.

When Peter, the man who dies on-camera in the film, agreed to let us record his end, the challenge was to film it respectfully, sensitively, but most of all truthfully.

We don't romanticise it - there could be no fade to black before he drank the poison.

It is up to you to decide whether his last moments are deeply moving, distressing, or rather ordinary.

I suspect it is a little bit of each of these and, depending on your own family's experiences, so much more.

Helping someone have an assisted death is still technically illegal, so we were very careful to make sure that we were there purely as impartial observers.

We didn't break the law, though it was impossible not to feel a deep connection with Peter and his wife - and for Andrew and his mother, who also journeyed to Dignitas.

Everyone involved in the production, no matter what their views on legalising assisted dying, has been profoundly affected by the experience.

I hope that you are too.

Charlie Russell is the director and producer of Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die.

Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die is available in iPlayer until Monday, 20 June.

Choosing To Die: A Newsnight debate with Terry Pratchett and Jeremy Paxman is also available in iPlayer until Monday, 20 June.

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

Every other person I mentioned the book to adored it, especially women, and had very strong feelings about who should play Jackson Brodie and what the series should look like.

No pressure, then.

But first I had to meet Kate Atkinson.

I've adapted Tom Brown's Schooldays and Under The Greenwood Tree in the past, but those novelists were safely dead and not waiting for me in their house in Edinburgh.

Nobody was as crass to mention it, of course, but this was sort of an audition for me.

As I knocked on Kate's front door and marshalled my thoughts I realised this is how actors must feel a lot of the time.

Note to self - be nicer to actors.

So Kate and I strolled around Edinburgh in the rain, talking about her characters, where they might live and eat and drink.

Case Histories is actually set in Cambridge but, as we were adapting three of the books and they're each set in a different place, it was clearly going to be necessary for us to decide on one city and try to make it a character in its own right.

I plumped for Edinburgh, not because Kate lived there, but because it has such a wonderful Gothic presence that I felt would fit perfectly with Kate's form of skewed realism.

I loved writing the scripts. The heavy-lifting had already been done by Kate - the characters, the story, the tone - so my job was to smash up the novel and re-imagine it as a screenplay. A fresh mosaic.

I decided to curve one story over two episodes, to give each two-parter a strong structure, and then largely play out separate self-contained stories in each episode.

It meant that the films wouldn't have the relentless, restless narrative that you often get on TV in this genre, but could meander through murder to domesticity, from comedy to tragedy.

Jason Isaacs as Jackson Brodie and Marion Bailey as Gloria Hatter

The books always struck me for their very grown-up sense of sexuality and disappointed hope.

The structure gave us the chance to do justice to that - to sometimes sit back off the main thrust of the story and explore Jackson's life and past a bit.

It's always a privilege to spend time with other writers' characters and works, living or dead. It's not for the faint-hearted.

I know there are armies of Atkinson fans out there who have their own utterly perfect version of Jackson Brodie in their heads, and who will curse me for fiddling with perfection.

But what joy, to take tea with one of our finest living novelists in a damp cafe in Edinburgh and talk about writing. What could be better? A beer with Thomas Hardy?

Ashley Pharoah is the scriptwriter of episodes one and two of Case Histories.

Case Histories continues on Sunday, 12 June at 9pm on BBC One and BBC One HD and at 11.15pm on BBC HD.

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

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

There's a hurried huddled conversation about different angles, black-out shades and other possible solutions but we quickly realise the best and speediest option is to ask the airport authority to dim the lights, or even better, turn them off.

All eyes turn to our intrepid location manager and with an imperceptible shrug, he sets off in the direction of the airport.

In so many ways, the scene embodies the spirit of the whole piece.

It orients the audience, tells them to pay close attention to even the smallest thing now, because it's likely to mean a great deal later on.

And the beautiful spare language that Hugo has given Sergeant Foley as he describes what exactly it is that they are looking at, tells us that the world we're entering is different from what we might be expecting - slightly heightened, elevated but hidden.

As Gotham is to New York, so is our world to London.

Thus far, we've managed to achieve it here on the Island, finding, amongst other hidden gems of locations, probably the only street in Douglas that could double for a street in London.

And it's all been conducted with good humour and in a spirit of camaraderie, whether it's scouting for locations while the Isle of Man TT Motorcycle Race takes place around us or cramming just over 15 cast and crew (and their equipment) for a whole day into a hermetically sealed hotel room on what turned out to be the hottest day of the year, without any of them passing out.

Or the day we (intentionally) caused an explosion that landed us on the front page of the Manx Independent and gave the people of Peel a night out to remember.

Or shooting a scene in a church graveyard, with Charles Kay (Pendleton in Edge Of Darkness) giving a brilliantly sinister, yet humorous performance, and just as the camera cranes upwards for the final shot, a sheep nonchalantly ambles out from behind a gravestone as if on cue, adding to the slight surrealism of it all (and it made the final cut).

Or the day when several cast and crew members hugged the ground behind a low wall out of sight while the cinematographer raced to the top of Snaefell Mountain to get the last panoramic shot.

Snaefell Mountain, from which local legend states that one can see six kingdoms: Man, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland and the sixth, Heaven. But only if the fog stays away and that day, it had been threatening to roll in, all day.

But we got that shot with minutes to spare and now, we need to get this one.

Because, just as the two sides on either side of the line slowly converge in the narrative, so the two lines of flashlight should converge on Harvey's car.

The shot is the embodiment of the whole story, all seven episodes of the series. So, we really do need it to be dark.

The location manager returns. Yes! They'll do it, but only for an hour, there's yet one more flight coming in later on.

And as the camera turns over, I hear a crew member saying under his breath, "They'd better let that plane land, 'cause it'll be the one that we have to get in the morning to get to London to finish the shoot."

Well, we got the shot, we got the plane and we got to London.

Where we would get to the first day of shoot, only to discover it's the first of what will be several tube strikes that late summer and spend several days running around Victoria Park, with a camera buggy struggling to keep up with an actor who probably could've qualified for the British Olympic 100m squad.

But that's another story.

Johann Knobel is the producer of The Shadow Line.

The Shadow Line is on BBC Two and BBC HD at 9pm on Thursday, 5 May.

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

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

While making this film last March, I found myself shivering in a Georgian swimming costume (a long white linen shift, with lead weights sewn into its hem so that it wouldn't float up and reveal a lady's legs), about to take a freezing dip from Bognor Regis beach.

I was trying to imagine the Georgian urge to bathe in cold water - an urge that the Tudors and Stuarts before them had failed to feel.

As well as enjoying a chilly sea dip as a presumed cure for infertility, constipation and impotence, the Georgians were the first people to bathe regularly at home. But they still had no separate bathrooms, and washed in tubs in a bedroom or kitchen.

In cities the tub might be filled from the exciting new plumbed-in taps now to be found in Georgian basements.

The bathroom's laggardly development is one of the things that surprised me most about the home's history, and bizarrely it was society's attitudes towards personal hygiene rather than technology that set the pace.

Despite Sir John Harrington building and writing a book about the flushing toilet in Elizabethan times, it wasn't until the 19th century that the flush became widespread.

For If Walls Could Talk, we spent several (very cold) months recreating different bits of historic domestic life - and every time I learned something new about what it was really like to live in the past.

Episode two also reveals exactly how well urine works as a Tudor stain-remover, when bubble bath was invented, and even how Georgian ladies went to the loo (they used a jug rather like a gravy-boat - easy to use discreetly in a big hooped skirt).

I even used Sir John Harrington's detailed instructions to build his 1590s design for a toilet. To my amazement, it really worked, successfully flushing down a handful of cherry tomatoes.

Having made this series, I see my own home with new eyes. And when I look at my clean, convenient, cholera-free toilet - the john - I thank its namesake Sir John Harrington.

Lucy Worsley is chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces and presenter of If Walls Could Talk: The History Of The Home.

Episode two, The Bathroom, is on Wednesday, 20 April at 9pm on BBC Four and 9.50pm on BBC HD.

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

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