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From Young Victoria to The Boxer Rebellion, Stonehenge to the Ten Pound Poms, explore the past with Timewatch.

The Timewatch Team diary about the making of the Wreckers programme.

Friday 1 June

The past week has been taken up with the online when the programme goes through several technical steps to ensure it is of tip top quality for broadcast. This includes the “dub”, where the sound is perfected, and the “grade” where the picture and colours are tweaked. The final thing today was the commentary recording when Michael Praed (ex Robin Hood!), the voice of Timewatch, recorded the programme’s commentary. The programme is finally finished. I think we are all pretty pleased with the result, and hope our viewers will enjoy the journey around our British coast as well as gaining a fascinating insight into coastal life through the centuries and understanding how modern-day lifesaving was actually born out of something more unsavoury – wrecking.

About the author

Timewatch is the world's longest-running history series, having started in 1981, and is the BBC's flagship history series. Here, members of the production team share the highs, and lows, during the production process as they make some of the next series of programmes.

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Blogging about

Timewatch

From Young Victoria to The Boxer Rebellion, Stonehenge to the Ten Pound Poms, explore the past with Timewatch.

Wednesday 23 May

We have a viewing with John Farren [executive producer]. By the end of the session, Chris and John have decided to drop the whole sequence on the Western Isles and Whisky Galore. It’s not uncommon at this late stage to do this if a sequence is getting in the way of the story and in danger of confusing the audience. In this case, the Whisky Galore story comes too late in the film for what it tells the viewer about wrecking, so when we come to the sequence, it doesn’t follow on from the thought before but is like going backwards. We think about moving it up to the front of the film but that wouldn’t make sense to Bella’s geographic journey in the programme. Finally the decision is made to drop it. It’s a real shame, as personally it is one of my favourite sequences in the film partly because the Whisky Galore film archive is so funny. But it’s true; the story arc works much better without it.

About the author

Timewatch is the world's longest-running history series, having started in 1981, and is the BBC's flagship history series. Here, members of the production team share the highs, and lows, during the production process as they make some of the next series of programmes.

Subscribe to Timewatch's posts

 

Blogging about

Timewatch

From Young Victoria to The Boxer Rebellion, Stonehenge to the Ten Pound Poms, explore the past with Timewatch.

Friday 11 May

Chris and Nick Packer [editor] have been in the edit suite for several weeks now chopping the film up, moving around sequences and trying to craft the story. It’s the hardest part of making a film and where the real story telling and creativity comes in. Meanwhile I – with the help of Caroline Rough [production coordinator] – have been sourcing stills and texts that we want to include in the film. Down in the Isles of Scilly, the Gibson family have a wonderful collection of beautiful black and white photographs of sailing shipwrecks taken in the early C20th, which they are kindly letting us reproduce. Tracking down some of the texts we want is proving quite hard as many of the books are obscure local histories and out of print.

About the author

Timewatch is the world's longest-running history series, having started in 1981, and is the BBC's flagship history series. Here, members of the production team share the highs, and lows, during the production process as they make some of the next series of programmes.

Subscribe to Timewatch's posts